10 Horror Movies You Didn’t Know Were Connected

Meta-slasher mockumentary Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is chock-full of winks, nudges, and outright references to numerous classic slasher movies and villains, but perhaps its most interesting connection is also its most well-hidden.

Part-way through the film, we're introduced to Leslie's mentor Eugene, a man who speaks of his own brief stint as a killer. He talks about how he pre-dates the likes of Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger but never reached the same heights of notoriety. The details of his murders also match up with a certain festive killer that was never caught, namely the mysterious Billy from Bob Clark's seminal Black Christmas.

Eugene claims that he never got the attention he deserved, and he's largely been forgotten to history, which is most likely a commentary on Black Christmas being more of a cult classic than a pop-culture phenomenon like Halloween or Friday the 13th.

This detail isn't explicitly written into the script, but genre-enthusiasts could easily discern his identity, and the film's director Scott Glosserman has confirmed on more than one occasion that Eugene was intended to be Billy, but for some reason, it never ended up that way.