William Harms

There’s a short interview with me over at All the Rage on silverbulletcomicbooks.com. Included are two preview pages from issue # 4.

I had really hoped to see Behind the Mask in the theater, but it only played for a week in Seattle. The premise is pure gold: A documentary crew follows around a slasher-in-training named Leslie Vernon and he shows them how he’s preparing for his big night (which involves murder on a grand scale). The crew goes with Leslie as he stalks the teenagers he’s planning to carve up, meet with a retired killer named Eugene (who acts as Leslie’s mentor) and even help Leslie out with some smaller parts of his operation.

The great thing about Behind the Mask is that Leslie is not only extremely sympathetic, he’s also very likeable. He’s someone you’d want to pal around with, the kind of kid you’d want dating your daughter. The only problem is that he wants to be the next Jason Voorhees.

And that’s why the parts that show Leslie doing his cardio and preparing the house where the killings will occur are so great. Leslie isn’t a fire breathing monster. He’s just like you and me.

There were only a couple of areas where Behind the Mask falls down a bit, and that’s one of them. I wish more had been made of how the real killers in our society (like Ted Bundy) can transform from a charming, nice man into a raging murderer. Leslie undergoes a similar transformation in the movie–one minute he’s carving up people, the next he’s joking around. That is pretty terrifying to contemplate and I wish it had been examined a bit more.

The other thing that bugged me is the hows and whys of the film crew that is filming Leslie. There is definitely fertile ground to cover in terms of doing a blood-drenched satire of our celebrity-driven culture (you got Paris Hilton? I’ll do you one better! I got a real-life crazed lunatic!), but the movie never really enters that territory, and I think it suffers a bit because of it.

In the end, though, Behind the Mask is a lot of fun. Definitely a must see for horror fans.

My good friend Rob Osborne has posted his strip, The Nearly Infamous Zango, online. It is truly hilarious and should not be missed. Check it out.

Cindy’s been gone the past week, so I’ve been spending a lot of time reading graphic novels. One of them is The Wrath of Spectre, which reprints the Spectre stories from Adventure Comics. I read most of these stories years ago, and I loved them then and I love them now. All of these tales follow a simple formula: Crooks commit crime; Detective Jim Corrigan investigates; Corrigan finds out who the perps are; Corrigan turns into Spectre and the crooks meet a grisly fate. The stories were written by Michael Fleisher and illustrated by the criminally underrated Jim Aparo, and the introduction (by comic book historian Peter Sanderson) says that the strip was killed because the stories were a little too hardcore.

These stories originally ran in the mid-70s (and every other one mentions Watergate in some fashion), and I suppose that showing the Spectre turning people into glass and then shattering them, impaling them with giant scissors, or turning a bad guy into a skeleton right in the middle of an airliner was a bit much for back then.

As for me, I love it. This is exactly how the spirit of vengeance should operate.