The terms “meta-text” or “meta-fiction” are used to describe stories in which the author draws attention to the mechanics of the narrative. These stories tend to play on the conventions of particular storytelling forms, exposing the clichés and commenting on the joys or expectations that audiences have of a chosen genre. Meta-fiction tends to be playful or satirical, if not outright funny, but it is distinct from parody. Parody tends to exaggerate a story or a genre or make absurd juxtapositions that result in comedy. A piece of meta-fiction may exaggerate its inspiration a little but these stories tend to maintain the tone and scale of other entries in their field and retain the satisfaction that audiences get from that kind of narrative. The intent of a piece of metafiction is to comment upon a genre or a storytelling style and make the audience think about how these stories work and what they mean for the individual viewer and for the culture. For that reason, metafiction can be highly instructive for audiences, at least when these meta-stories are done well.
Horror has seen moviemakers take a meta approach more than any other film genre. The reasons for that may have partly to do with a heightened level of awareness among the genre’s filmmakers and fans. The horror audience tends to be a little more educated on the history and craft of filmmaking, at least more so than the average viewer of action pictures and romantic comedies. The frequency of metafiction in the horror genre may also be due to the mythological aspect of these films. A lot of horror stories play out like folk tales and urban legends and so they have an inherent mythological quality that lends itself to analysis and deconstruction. The horror genre also has a renegade quality. These movies are considered disreputable and even subversive, leading filmmakers and their fans to defend the genre. Meta-horror gives filmmakers an opportunity to “class up” their films by appealing to the intelligensia or a chance to provoke the mainstream by embracing horror’s counter cultural tendencies. Lastly, these movies allow for bonding between the filmmaker and the audience. Because horror tends to be marginalized, its fans and craftsmen are bound together by something they love and meta-horror allows filmmakers to wink at the audience, acknowledging the joy they share in the genre.
Today’s episode of Sounds of Cinema took a close look at some notable meta-horror titles. Here are the films discussed on the show as well as some additional selections.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
Dir. Scott Glosserman
Released a decade after Scream, this film sent up the slasher genre in much the same way that Wes Craven’s 1996 film had but Behind the Mask is distinct. For one, Scream was a movie made by and for fans of the horror genre but Behind the Mask is a little more cerebral and plays like a movie made by and for film students. It also makes effective use of the pseudo-documentary format as a crew follows the preparation and training of a guy who is planning to become the next great American serial killer in the mold of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. This is a very smart and well-made film and it’s one of the best horror pictures of the past decade.
The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
Dir. Drew Goddard
Co-written by Joss Whedon, The Cabin the Woods invokes a lot of clichés from a wide swath of horror subgenres including the zombie film, the haunted house movie, and slashers. For fans of horror there is a lot of fun to be had in spotting all of the references to other movies. The Cabin in the Woods includes a very inventive twist on horror clichés and the ending is especially interesting, in part because the scenario has dark and provocative implications for why audiences crave horror stories.
Candyman (1992)
Dir. Bernard Rose
Candyman was based on “The Forbidden,” a short story written by Clive Barker. Filmmaker Bernard Rose adapted the material, setting it in the Cabrini–Green housing projects in Chicago. The film tells the story of a white female academic writing a thesis on urban legends. While investigating the myth of the Candyman, the ghost of a black male with one hand replaced by jagged hook, she begins to suspect that the myth might be real. The film was somewhat controversial at the time because it utilized imagery of a white woman being accosted by a black male, but this is a very smart film about the history of slavery and the legacy of racism as well as the social function of urban legends.
Cannibal Holocaust (1980)
Dir. Ruggero Deodato
The “mondo” genre refers to what are usually called “shock-umentaries,” which usually consist of news outtakes and staged death scenes as seen in the Faces of Death series or footage of non-Western cultures offered up for exotic titillation as in Africa Addio. The mondo genre was at its height in the 1970s although it continues today, primarily through the internet. Capitalizing on the popularity of the mondo genre and the then-popular fad of cannibal movies, filmmaker Ruggero Deodato made Cannibal Holocaust. The film told the story of a group of filmmakers who disappeared in the Amazon while making a mondo-style documentary about cannibalism; in the first half of the movie an anthropologist embarks on a rescue mission and finds their footage and in the second half that footage is screened. It’s revealed that the documentarians attacked the natives, attempting to incite savage behavior for the cameras, and eventually the natives struck back and killed the Westerners. Cannibal Holocaust gave birth to what is now regarded as the “found footage” genre and as a matter of cinematic craft it is extremely well produced, especially in the second half. However, Cannibal Holocaust is also one of the most hated films ever made and it frequently appears on lists of the most disturbing films of all time. The killing scenes were so convincing that the movie was pulled from Italian theaters because authorities believed it to be a snuff film. The movie’s infamy is also due to the fact that it features the actors killing real animals. Its outrageous content makes Cannibal Holocaust genuinely unpleasant but it also possesses an intelligence that goes beyond what viewers expect from an exploitation film.
Fright Night (1985)
Dir. Tom Holland
Fright Night is intended as both a tribute to Victorian horror and an attempt to update those stories. A teenager discovers that his neighbor is a vampire and when he fails to convince anyone of the truth, he turns to an aging actor who hosts a late night horror telecast. The movie is mostly just fun but it’s got enough self-awareness that fans of the vampire genre will get something more from it.
Funny Games (1997/2007)
Dir. Michael Haneke
Funny Games tells a home invasion story in which a family is held hostage by two preppy teenagers who torture and humiliate them. The film was intended to have a confrontational tone with its audience. Filmmaker Michael Haneke was disgusted with the way in which American filmmakers present violence in their movies and he intended Funny Games to question that violence. He initially made the film in 1997 with an Austrian cast but due to its non-English language the movie’s American distribution was limited to art house theaters. Years later, in the midst of the popularity of torture films like Hostel and Saw, Haneke remade Funny Games literally shot-for-shot but with English-speaking actors. Unfortunately for Haneke, the 2007 version of the film wasn’t much more successful at the box office. Nevertheless, the merits of both versions of Funny Games are fiercely debated among the audiences and critics who have seen them.
Grindhouse (2007)
Dir. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino
Films that are described as “meta” often draw attention to the fact that the audience is watching a movie and they deliberately break the illusion of the motion picture or draw attention to the narrative and filmmaking conventions. Sometimes this is done to critique the form, other times filmmakers do this to pay tribute to their favorite movies, and in a few cases it’s simply done to play with the audience. With 2007’s Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino set out to create a simulacrum of the sleazy independent theater experience of the 1970s. Grindhouse was a double feature of two movies—Rodriguez’s Planet Terror and Tarantino’s Death Proof—with trailers before and between features and defects on the film print. It was a self-indulgent but fun tribute to a bygone era although watching Grindhouse in a corporate multiplex did not necessarily give the movie the venue it deserved.
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
Dir. Rob Zombie
Rob Zombie, who had established himself as the front man to the rock band White Zombie, made the transition to feature filmmaker with House of 1000 Corpses. The movie was initially a Universal production, was shot on the Universal lot, and utilized the iconography of the classic Universal monster movies. Zombie’s goal seems to have been to merge the classic monster movies of the 1940s with the grindhouse movies of the 1970s and the music video aesthetics of contemporary media, creating a composite horror aesthetic. The result was disturbing in some places and obnoxious in others. Universal executives were horrified by the final result and sold it to Lionsgate. Zombie greatly improved his filmmaking skills in the 2005 sequel, The Devil’s Rejects.
The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (2011)
Dir. Tom Six
When The Human Centipede (First Sequence) was released in 2009 it caused an uproar among critics and horror audiences. The film told the story of a mad surgeon who kidnapped three people and used skin grafts and stitches the sow them together, mouth to rectum, to form a single gastric system. For The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), filmmaker Tom Six stepped outside the diegesis of the first movie to tell a story of a disturbed fan of First Sequence who creates his own human centipede but with barbed wire and a staple gun. Full Sequence is even more grotesque than its progenitor but it’s unclear what viewers are supposed to make of the meta approach. A third installment (Final Sequence) is forth coming.
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Dir. John Carpenter
Filmmaker John Carpenter has had an up and down career but his highs were very high including titles such as Halloween, Escape from New York, and The Thing. The last great movie that Carpenter made was 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness. In this film Sam Neil plays an insurance fraud investigator who searches for a missing horror writer on behalf of a publisher. The author’s books are known to cause violent mental breakdowns in his readers and as the investigator digs into the literature he finds reality and fantasy become indistinguishable. This is a smart, scary, and sometimes very funny movie about the cult-like qualities of fandom.
New Nightmare (1994)
Dir. Wes Craven
In 1984 Wes Craven created A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film about teenagers stalked in their dreams by Freddy Krueger, a bogeyman who wears a glove with knives fashioned onto the fingertips. The success of the first movie spawned a series of sequels, which Craven had little to do with, and turned Freddy into a cultural icon. Ten years after the original Elm Street picture, Craven returned to the series with New Nightmare. This film was unique in that it took place in the “real world” and featured the cast and crew of the original film playing themselves as they are haunted by a specter who closely resembles Freddy Krueger. The film was an opportunity for Craven to reflect on what his creation had become and upon the relationship between commerce and art. New Nightmare is among the best titles in the Nightmare on Elm Street series and of Wes Craven’s career.
Peeping Tom (1960)
Dir. Michael Powell
Horror was changed in 1960 by two films: Psycho and Peeping Tom. The former, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is now celebrated as one of the greatest movies ever made while the latter has languished and only recently has the film begun to gain the attention it deserves. Peeping Tom is about a photographer and a filmmaker who is a scopophiliac—he has an obsessive erotic attachment to visual images—and he is most stimulated by images of women in fear. In order to satisfy his fetish, the photographer documents himself killing women with a hidden blade that juts out of his camera tripod. Peeping Tom is about the link between imagery and desire and it’s an important precursor to the found footage format. When it was released in 1960 Peeping Tom so horrified audiences that director Michael Powell, who was considered an esteemed filmmaker to that point, had his career effectively ruined. Decades later Martin Scorsese championed the film, claiming that Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Federico Fellini’s 8½ collectively said everything there was to say about filmmaking. Scorsese briefly considered remaking Peeping Tom but after rescreening it he concluded that there was no way to top what Michael Powell had created.
Scream (1996)
Dir. Wes Craven
Following New Nightmare, filmmaker Wes Craven directed Scream. In this movie, a group of teenagers are stalked by a killer that abides by the so-called “rules” of slasher films: those who drink or do drugs, have sex, or say things like “I’ll be right back” end up dead. Scream was more populist than New Nightmare; as Wes Craven would put it, New Nightmare was for the people who made the movies and Scream was for the audience. Although some of the story’s technical details have dated (the interrogation about cell phone ownership is ludicrous now), Scream is a really fun murder mystery with a sharp wit and a judicious use of violence. It spawned a series of sequels that, although never as good as the original, were better than most horror follow ups.
Sean of the Dead (2004)
Dir. Edgar Wright
The first feature film collaboration between director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost came with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead. The same way Scream played on slasher film clichés, Shaun of the Dead emphasized the conventions of zombie movies while fulfilling them and it found a devoted audience. Unlike a lot of the spoof movies of the past decade, which lazily and with great contempt spewed pop culture references at the audience, the makers of Shaun of the Dead took the time to tell a substantive story with interesting characters and they clearly loved the movies that they were referencing.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Dir. E. Elias Merhige
One of the earliest surviving vampire movies is the 1922 silent feature Nosferatu. Based (without legal clearance) on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and directed by F.W. Murnau and featuring actor Max Schreck in the lead role, Nosferatu remains one of the most popular and influential vampire movies. In 2000 E. Elias Merhige directed Shadow of the Vampire. This film told a fictional story inspired by the making of Nosferatu with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Schreck. In this mix of horror and comedy, Murnau is a madman who has recruited an actual vampire to play the role but Shreck has the unfortunate habit of killing the cast and crew.
Targets (1968)
Dir. Peter Bogdanovich
Based loosely on the murders of Charles Whitman, Targets was a startling tale of a lone gunman out on a killing spree. The film starred Boris Karloff (in one of his last roles) as an aged horror actor who realizes that the Victorian gothic horror he had made a career out of is no longer relevant. Targets is a thrilling story that juxtaposes the violence of entertainment with the violence of the everyday and does so in a way that is thoughtful and disturbing. It has become a forgotten classic but it deserves to be more widely seen.
Urban Legend (1998)
Dir. Jamie Blanks
Following the success of Scream and Scream 2, self-referential movies became all the rage in American cinema and two years after Wes Craven’s 1996 film, Urban Legend was released. As in the Scream pictures, the cast of Urban Legend were a group of young people who were terrorized by a killer whose drew inspiration from popular stories. In this case, the kills were based on urban myths. The moviemakers of Urban Legends desperately follow the path trod by Scream and Scream 2 but to mixed effect.