Examples of meta narrative11/24/2023 Kaufman makes her a character in the film, along with himself and his fictional twin brother Donald (who shares a screenplay credit) they’re there presumably to keep him from having to “cram in sex or guns or car chases, you know… or characters, you know, learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end,” all of which happens, of course, partially due to the insistent advice of screenwriting guru Robert McKee (Brian Cox), after a blocked Charlie reluctantly attends one of his workshops. But his most self-aware project - to date, anyway - is Adaptation, he and director Spike Jonze’s film version of the seemingly unadaptable nonfiction book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Nobody writes meta better than Charlie Kaufman, whose scripts have taken us inside the brain of John Malkovich (and dumped us off in a ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike) and onto a never-ending to-scale stage production of a life in progress. Craven’s most personal film to date, it finds the filmmaker asking some fascinating questions about what draws us to horror films, and what responsibility their makers hold when the lights come up. But Craven returned to the character of Freddy Krueger for New Nightmare, both directing the film and writing its screenplay, in which he and several of the original film’s actors - including actors Robert Englund, Heather Langenkamp, and John Saxon - play themselves, haunted by a Freddy who crosses over from the fictional world they’ve created to the real one they inhabit. The increasingly cartoonish Nightmare on Elm Street series, which Craven had bowed out of after part three (and then only as an executive producer), had concluded with 1991’s Freddy’s Dead. The wildly successful film spawned three sequels, and while the third and fourth installments were rather underwhelming, part two also featured some inspired riffs on how the rules are revised for (inevitably disappointing) sequels.Ĭraven came to Scream after his own experimentation with self-reflective horror two years earlier. In 1996, Wes Craven was handed a clever screenplay by newcomer Kevin Williamson (originally titled Scary Movie, ha ha) that asked a simple question: what if the protagonists of a horror movie were themselves connoisseurs of horror movies, and thus aware of what to do and not do? Scream raised the usual stakes - and made the audience experience exponentially more participatory - by explicitly stating the “rules that one must abide by in order to survive a horror movie,” and then tinkering with our expectations. Whedon and Goddard were far from the first filmmakers to examine the clichés of the genre within a comic construct. So we wanted to get behind the horror movie, and deconstruct it while at the same time celebrating how much fun they are.” And that’s the joy of the film (which he co-wrote with director Drew Goddard): it manages to simultaneously embrace, spoof, and analyze the tropes of the modern horror movie - and the bloodlust of cinema in general. “We also are very curious about what makes them tick. “We love horror movies,” Joss Whedon explained at this year’s SXSW festival, where Cabin made its long-awaited premiere. After the jump, some thoughts on Cabin and nine more of our favorite self-aware motion pictures. You see, Cabin is the latest example of our old friend the “meta-movie,” the films in which the act of moviemaking (and movie-watching) is part of the experience, and part of the narrative. The Cabin in the Woods, the wickedly funny and winkingly knowing horror/comedy from director Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon, hits DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow, after a long-delayed theatrical run last spring that sent cinephiles spinning with pleasure.
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