10 great films about making a horror film

It’s only inevitable that most films about the making of a horror film would slot neatly into the horror genre themselves. For all their calibrated frights, such grisly tableaux can take a real mental and emotional toll on their craftsmen, the make-believe monstrosities tapping into actual primal fears. The idea of losing yourself in a movie is often taken to its most unsettling end in these films, with trauma that persists long after the credits roll.

Similar ideas emerge in Jane Schoenbrun’s tender, self-reflective new release Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in which breakout indie filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) is tasked with configuring a revival of the 80s slasher series ‘Camp Miasma’, a Friday the 13th-style franchise that once helped her better understand herself. 

As she attempts to come up with an origin story for main antagonist Little Death (Jack Haven), who arises from the depths of a lake to violently spear hapless campers, the film itself becomes a skewering of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy and formulaic decision-making. Personal and artistic rejuvenation, however, are possible once Kris tracks down reclusive actress Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) – the original film’s Final Girl – in the hopes of persuading her to star in the “elevated” reboot. As they watch and trade notes on an old print of the first instalment, the process cracks open a window into their own psyches, enabling revelations both painful and cathartic. 

With the film camping out in cinemas this week, here are 10 others that delve into the terrors and triumphs of making a horror movie.

Director: Pere Portabella

The high-contrast of some of Vampir Cuadecuc’s sequences exude the ghostly uncanniness of a photo negative, fitting for a film about the undead. In documenting the making of Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), director Pere Portabella reconstructs its scenes from different vantage points, finding a fresh angle on the all-too-familiar gothic tale. His striking creative choices, including the strange incongruous noises that pierce through the eerie silence, result in a film far more original and atmospheric than the one it’s reworking.

This experimental Spanish film’s black-and-white photography and the absence of audible dialogue evoke the silent cinema of an older era, even as its vampire only grows younger over time. Vampir Cuadecuc, however, is just as intent on shattering its immersion by repeatedly emphasising its staginess. There are shots that reveal the Count Dracula crew at work, or actor Christopher Lee removing his vampire fangs. The cobwebs in Dracula’s castle haven’t accumulated over the centuries, but are spun instantly out of a handheld device, temporal barriers shattered yet again.

Director: Dusty Nelson

There are those who would die for their art. And then there are those who would kill. It’s no surprise which one low-budget horror filmmaker Lacey Bickel (John Harrison), with his disturbing affinity for ultraviolent death sequences, turns out to be.

Effects, which follows the shooting of a sleazy slasher in rural Pennsylvania, is structured with such absorbing slipperiness that it only becomes apparent whether an unfolding scene belongs to the film or Lacey’s film-within-the-film when a take is interrupted or the behind-the-scenes crew is glimpsed. A remote cabin doubles up as both crew lodging and shooting location, further blurring the lines between real and envisioned carnage. At the same time, the sporadic appearance of a blue filter and voyeuristic points of view signal that the unsuspecting crew has become the subject of another, far more sinister film being shot concurrently. It’s one that only Lacey knows the ending to.

Director: Brian De Palma

Blow Out begins and ends with a scream. Adopting the killer’s POV at first, the camera stalks the hallways of a sorority house before creeping up to a student in the shower. A knife is raised, but what ensues is a distinctly artificial wail, one that elicits laughter from a technician watching the scene back at his booth. This sequence, it transpires, belongs not to Blow Out, but to low-budget slasher ‘Co-Ed Frenzy’, a movie-within-the-movie. By setting up a sequence that could’ve come from any of his lurid erotic thrillers, then deflating that tension by revealing it to be staged, Brian De Palma introduces the film’s themes of artifice, and the ease of duping an unsuspecting audience.

As Co-Ed Frenzy’s sound technician (John Travolta) figures out how to source a better scream, the filmmaker lets us in on the construction of another narrative: that of an official cover-up being set into motion. Blow Out opens with an illusion, and by its bitter end, everything real and meaningful has been sickeningly folded into it too. The mystery thriller’s warning – to question the veracity of any medium susceptible to manipulation – is enduring, and in the AI era, more urgent than ever.

Director: Lucio Fulci

What’s a filmmaker to do when his body of work begins to torment his mind? In the clever meta movie A Cat in the Brain, ‘Godfather of Gore’ Lucio Fulci – an Italian filmmaker best known for his giallo and horror films – plays a fictionalised version of himself haunted by his own output. When he leaves his set, the images of blood and brutality that he’s composed follow him around nonetheless.

Even as the buzz of a handyman’s saw wrenches Fulci back to a scene of corpse dismemberment, and the sight of a restaurant’s steak tartare repulses him (his cannibal protagonist did just similarly mince up some human flesh minutes earlier), the director gleefully loads this film with enough graphic imagery to make viewers squeamish too. While peppering in references to his own movies, such as Touch of Death (1990), Fulci also addresses his detractors: a sequence in which a psychiatrist hypnotises him to take the fall for a murder spree reads as a sly jab at anyone who might scapegoat horror movies as the cause of real-world violence.

Director: Wes Craven

A decade after Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) visualised the boundary between dreams and lived reality as porous, elements from one realm slipping into the other with unnerving ease, his meta slasher New Nightmare blurred the lines between fiction and experiential fact. In reimagining franchise antagonist Freddy Krueger as a malevolent entity who remained trapped within his movies and unable to terrorise the ‘real world’ as long as new instalments continued, Craven – playing himself here – justifies the existence of his newest saga entry while also enabling himself to craft a more vicious version of a character whose metal-clawed menace was blunted in subsequent appearances.

New Nightmare retains much from its predecessor, but its most moving narrative choice hinges on change wrought by the passage of time. Having played a child whose parents were ill-equipped to protect her in the first Nightmare, actress Heather Langenkamp is now a mother desperate to shield her young son from the same evil. Her horror movies may have helped pay the bills, but they also exact a terrible cost.

Director: Anthony Waller

The director of a low-budget slasher film remains unimpressed by the staging of its big murder sequence. More blood, he demands. More pain! A subsequent stabbing exceeds his goriest expectations, only he isn’t around to see it. Nor was he ever meant to. Inadvertently locked inside the studio after the day’s shoot ends, it’s mute makeup artist Billy Hughes (Marina Zudina) who stumbles onto a couple of crew members making a snuff film, and must swiftly get away.

Having demonstrated an affinity for cheesy slasher tropes in his Blow Out-esque movie-within-a-movie opening sequence, director Anthony Waller now evokes a palpable, relentless terror as the killers stalk Billy through the building, each room providing another harrowing setting for a cat-and-mouse game filled with tense near-misses. The frustrating language barrier complicates Billy’s wordless struggle to make herself heard and understood – any friends are American, while the film is Moscow-set – and compounds her alienation. Off set too, there are people pretending to be someone they’re not, and even an official uniform is no guarantee of trustworthiness.

Director: E. Elias Merhige

A fictionalised account of the making of F.W. Murnau’s silent vampire film Nosferatu (1922), Shadow of the Vampire depicts filmmaking itself as a parasitic enterprise, one that drains the lives of the very people it immortalises onscreen. Based on the longstanding rumour that Count Orlok actor Max Schreck was every bit as supernatural as the entity he embodied, this film envisions a Murnau (John Malkovich) so disdainful of artifice that he did indeed hire an actual vampire to play one in the classic.

The director’s discovery (Willem Dafoe, in an Oscar-nominated performance of skin-crawling dread but also imbued pathos) is monstrous, and so is he, the film points out, for deliberately endangering his unknowing cast and crew. Shadow of the Vampire isn’t without moments of humour – the centuries-old creature proves to be as unaccommodating as any finicky method actor – but the precise recreation of Nosferatu’s scenes is serious business for director E. Elias Merhige, his monochromatic images as authentic and ethereal as anything the fictional Murnau strives for.

Director: J.J. Abrams

A group of teenagers sneak out to shoot an amateur zombie movie, but when their footage of a local train derailment ends up exposing the existence of an extraterrestrial lifeform, they become the target of a cruel military operation intent on suppressing it.

A Steven Spielberg co-produced riff on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Super 8 champions the poignancy and power of moving images. It also evokes the scrappiness and ‘anything goes’ exuberance of DIY filmmaking, from the teens minimising their need for production design, by relying on outdoor spaces for ambience, to them being self-taught in the art of zombie makeup. While the sci-fi thriller and its film-within-the-film share parallels (they both investigate and unravel the destructive dealings of a powerful organisation), writer-director J.J. Abrams’ skill lies in describing the techniques these kids use to render their movie more emotionally resonant, and then employing those ideas to absolutely wrenching effect himself.

Director: Peter Strickland

In a stroke of ingenuity, Berberian Sound Studio never shows us its film-within-the-film. Even as each gradually revealed snippet of ‘The Equestrian Vortex’ – witches, an underground poultry tunnel, “dangerously aroused” goblins – positions it as ridiculous, the immaculate sound design conjures up mental images that are chilling. Arriving in Italy to work on what he mistakenly assumes is a film about horses, meek and mild-mannered British sound engineer Gilderoy (Toby Jones) finds himself dropping squash to mimic the impact of a smashed head and snapping radish stalks to evoke a witch’s hair being ripped out.

Off-screen, other torments ensue as workers are systematically fed into the industry meat grinder. Predatory male directors stage gratuitous torture sequences on the pretext of depicting the historical persecution of women, all while exploiting their actresses. And as Gilderoy distorts, overlaps and amplifies their recorded screams over and over, the roar appears to emanate from inside his own head.

Director: Shinichiro Ueda

An ode to the creativity and compromises that fuel low-budget filmmaking, One Cut of the Dead gleefully illustrates how the choreographed precision of a single-take film could spark as much chaos in a crew as the sight of an invading zombie horde.

The first of the film’s three distinct acts plays out as a 37-minute-long-take in which the shooting of a zombie movie at a rundown Japanese plant is besieged by the real undead, unleashed upon the actors by their crazed director Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu). These ‘actual’ zombies, however, aren’t real, Higurashi himself is playing a character and the entire segment is revealed to have been staged as a single-shot zombie movie, broadcast in real time. The third and most joyous act revisits this initial film, but this time from the POV of the production, beset by difficulties ranging from indisposed crew members to last-minute understudies to frantic improvisation. For a film about reanimated corpses, One Cut of the Dead is giddily life-affirming.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is in UK cinemas from 21 August.