An Icons of Fright interview with David J. Stieve, co-writer of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon has revealed that there has recently been some renewed interest in, and therefore some hard work done on, a potential sequel. The first film was a fun, snappy mockumentary about a movie-style slasher letting slip some of the secrets of his trade that definitely deserves its ongoing long tail of DVD revenue. The big conceit was that in the movie’s world Jason Vorhees, Freddy Krueger, Michael Meyers and all those bad boys are real, and Vernon was looking to climb the ladder and become as well known.

Mask director Scott Glosserman was developing home invasion busser Playing House at Paramount Vantage but that seems, sadly, to have gone away. His next project seems to be a documentary (an actual documentary, not a Mask style mock one) called Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story, that he has co-directed with Nic Hill and is now, apparently, in post production. I’m going to go digging into that one over the weekend and see what I can’t find out, because the title is a doozy.

Below the break is a rather intriguing quote from Stieve about the direction the Mask sequel is likely to go in.

Here’s the bean spillage:

I can tell you that there is a way we’re blending the documentary and cinematic lenses again. And there is also a manner in which Taylor [the final girl in the first film] and Leslie [Vernon, slasher-killer] are forced to cooperate with one another, although not necessarily on the best of terms.

There’s definitely a perverse love story that must be honored, but then again they did try pretty hard to kill each other. Not exactly a ‘kiss and make up’ situation. There’s a sort of bigger, badder influence that’s threatening everything Leslie’s worked to accomplish, and Taylor may have her own agenda for ‘helping’ him. Or does she?

What a tease. The bigger badder influence is an interesting prospect, and so does the notion that Taylor’s motivations may not be obvious from scene one.

Scream is my pick of postmodern slasher deconstructions but there’s still room for more. Heck, there’s probably always going to be room for more.