Going back to the 1500s with the play,The Spanish Tragedy, there has been a subclass of nested plot structures (a story within a story)in which the nested story is performed or observed by the characters of the play. The most well-known versions of this are William Shakespeare’sHamletandA Midsummer Night’s Dream. Flashing forward to the era of film, this plot structure continues in movies that have movies within them – often making a dialogue about the people who make movies.
The echo of a film within a film strikes a subconscious chord with audiences. It taps intothe fractal nature of our realitythe way a Russian egg doll is a repetition of the same shape within itself. The universe contains repeating shapes: the structures of dark matter that connect the galactic clusters, the branches of a tree, the vein in the white of your eye. These are fractals. All movies represent a repetition of our reality on a 2D screen – a lower dimension. A movie within a movie, is a repetition of a repetition.
The question these Russian doll movies ultimately tickle in the backseat of our minds is what does the movie tell us about our own reality? Would you be disappointed to find out you are in a 3D movie, being watched by 4D or 5D beings?
The Truman Show (1998)
Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a normal man living in a perfect suburban neighborhood with zero crime, pristine streets, and perfect yards. It is a fictional world, like Mayberry, but Truman does not know he has spent his entire life on a television set. His life is a show. He was adopted by a corporation and inserted into a live, continuous show, to be watched around the world in a near future.
Truman outwardly projects that he suspects nothing, but he has long questioned his reality after a background character told him the truth. He plays along for years with the evolving plot that is written for him, and in the climax, Truman sneaks away in the night and steals a sailboat. He sails to the edge of his world, coming to a wall painted blue. There he finds a staircase and a door, and he makes his exit into reality.
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000)
The sequel to the found footage blockbuster,The Blair Witch Project, dumped the format of the first entry and filmed the actors in a traditional cinematography style, butBook of Shadows' plot revolves around the real-life onslaught of tourist fans who visited the tiny town of Burkittsville, Maryland, after the release of the movie. Jeffrey Donovan plays a Burkittsville local, Jeffrey Peterson, who operates a website selling Blair Witch memorabilia and hosting tours of the Black Hills Forest.
Jeffrey leads a group of tourists into the forest to camp, but during the night, they all have a blackout and wake up to find their things scattered around the campsite. They find their tapes, and when they return to Jeffrey’s home, they search the footage to find out what happened. The story comes to a peak with the deaths of two of the women. TheBlair Witchfans film the second woman’s death, but the recording reveals the scene played out entirely differently from how they experienced it.
In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
In John Carpenter’sIn the Mouth of Madness, themovie within the movie is the movie you are watching. Sam Neil plays John Trent, an insurance fraud investigator hired by a book publisher to find their missing star horror novelist, Sutter Cane. Trent discovers a map when he pieces together Cane’s book covers, and the map leads him to the small town of Hobbs End. In Hobbs End, Trent discovers Cane’s writing has manifested as reality, and the contents of the new book will drive the world mad and release interdimensional monsters on Earth.
Despite Trent’s attempt to stop the book from reaching the publisher, Cane forces him to deliver it against his will. The novel is published, and the movie adaptation is produced. In the end, Trent enters a theater and finally learns the truth: he is in a movie.
8MM (1999)
This noir detective story stars Nicolas Cage as private investigator, Tom Welles, and co-stars Joaquin Phoenix as Max California, a clerk who works at an adult film store. Welles is hired by a wealthy widow to investigate an 8mm film that her deceased husband financed. The film appears to be a snuff film – a movie that is made of someone being killed for the purpose of making the film to be sold. Welles is tasked with discovering if the movie is real, who the girl is, and who made the film.
Welles digs into an underground world of adult films with the help of Max, but when they get too close to the origin of the movie, they find themselves the targets of the film’s creators, and the story morphs into a dark, realistic superhero movie, far ahead of the explosion of comic book movies that would begin in a decade.
Six adult filmmakers travel to rural Texas in 1979 to make a dirty movie on a farm.Xstars Mia Goth and Jenna Ortega. The crew rents a cabin from an elderly couple, and the adult filmmakers shoot scenes for their movie in the cabin and the barn during the afternoon. At night, Ortega’s character, Lorraine, decides she wants to be a part of the movie, and she films a scene with the male star while her reluctant boyfriend, RJ, operates the camera. RJ, played by Owen Campbell, becomes emotional after the scene and tries to leave the farm by stealing the van, but he is stopped by the elderly woman, who stabs him to death.
The seniors then begin to murder the other crew members and actors. Goth plays both the elderly woman, Pearl, and the final girl, Maxine. A sequel,Maxxxine, is due to release either late 2023 or early 2024.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Before Wes Craven went meta with theScreamfranchise, he returned to theNightmarefranchisewith a sequel about the people who are making a newNightmaresequel, including Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy Thompson in the first and third films. Everyone involved in the making of the new sequel is being assaulted by a demon that has assumed the form of Freddy Krueger. The new movie that Craven is writing, which Langenkamp is set to star in, turns out to be the movie we are watching.
But there is another reading that changes the whole franchise – Langenkamp’s life inNew Nightmareis the dream of Nancy, who has been captive to Freddy since the first movie, and all ofNew Nightmareis a dream that the events of thefirst movie were a movie which Nancy starred in.
Related:The Exorcist: Why the Classic Horror Movie Should be Watched in Black and White
The Exorcist (1973)
Most of the attention towards the story ofThe Exorcistgoes to the possession, the identity of the demon, the struggle of the mother, Chris MacNeil, and the priest, Damien Karras, who is losing his faith before meeting the possessed Regan MacNeil and attempting to purge the demon from her. Amidst all of this is the context of MacNeil living in Georgetown during the fall because she is a movie star and filming a movie on the campus. This drifts into the background after the first act, and filming on the movie within the movie comes to an end with the death of the director at the hands of Regan.
But the context is important to the answer of why Regan was chosen by the demon. Regan is the daughter of a celebrity and is featured on magazine covers, as we see in the first act. This would be like any modern it-girl being possessed by a demon and destroyed. If the demon had won, the news would not report that Regan died after a long battle with a demon – the headlines would be about a crazed, religious mother who tied her mentally ill daughter up in her bedroom until she died of malnutrition and neglect. It would be a media frenzy.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
Quentin Tarantino’s ninth movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie, is the greatest movie about Hollywood ever made. There are too many fictional movies, fictional shows, and real shows with fictional appearances by DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton withinOnce Upon a Time… in Hollywoodto list here. The director sayshe wants to make a five episode miniseries ofBounty Law. The film centers around Dalton, whose career is in decline as he is aging, his work is sub-par due to his alcoholism, and he is being used as the villain in television shows, which he is told is damaging his brand. He is offered to do Italian movies, and he initially turns them down because he hates Italian movies, but he eventually gives in and travels to Europe.
Outside the story of making stories, there is a plot that is real Hollywood history bubbling in the background. Pitt’s Cliff Booth, gives a hippie a ride home, and it turns into a chance encounter with The Manson Family, which the hippie is a member of. Dalton lives on Cielo Drive, and his neighbors are Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, who will become the target of The Manson Family. Robbie plays the pregnant Sharon Tate. History takes an alternate route, however, when Dalton interrupts the killers on that fateful night, and they decide to invade his home instead, where Booth is also staying the night.
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
The Nazis are cinema’s favorite villains, but they are simultaneously linked with cinema history due to their propaganda, the most well-known of which is Triumph of the Will,which was referenced by George Lucas inA New Hope(painting the rebels as destined to become their fathers). Quentin Tarantino situates the plot ofInglourious Basterdsaround a theater that will host a Nazi propaganda movie about a sniper, and it will be attended by Adolph Hitler. The attendance of Hitler makes the event a target of dual plots to assassinate the Nazi leadership and end the war.
The propaganda film,Nation’s Pride, stars the sniper whose story it documents, played by Daniel Brühl, and the fictional historical character attends the showing, appearing both on the theater’s screen and outside of it, where he forces his way into the projection booth with the intent to sexually assault our heroine.
Last Action Hero (1993)
Last Action Herois about a boy named Danny Madigan, played by Austin O’Brien, who is a fan of the fictional action franchise,Jack Slater, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Slater movies are a parody of ’80s action/cop movies. Madigan is gifted a magic, golden movie ticket that belonged to Harry Houdini, and he cashes it in to watch the latest entry of theSlaterseries,Jack Slater IV.
The magic ticket transports Madigan into the movie universe. The villain of the fourthSlatermovie steals the ticket and escapes into the real world, followed by Madigan and Slater, who must get the ticket back before he unleashes the terrors of cinema upon the real world.
Related:Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron Reminisce About Arnold’s First Film Flop
