Things get very meta, very quick. You’re watching a film, then the characters in the film start watching a film. Sometimes, the films within the films look good. Great, even. You want to jump into the film and watch what they’re watching. Here are some examples of exactly that, films within films that we wish really existed.

Co-ed Frenzy in Blow Out
Brian De Palma’s loose reimagining of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Blow Out stars John Travolta as a sound effects technician who is creating the blood splatters and screams for a low-budget slasher film called Co-ed Frenzy. From what we see of Co-ed Frenzy, it is a fabulously extravagant slasher that involves naked women being stabbed in showers, à la Psycho, and a mysterious shadowy figure who loiters around sorority houses.

Invitation to Love in Twin Peaks
When the residents of Twin Peaks weren’t enjoying a cup of coffee and some cherry pie in the Double R diner, they were perched on their couches watching the latest episode of the soap opera Invitation to Love. You don’t see a whole lot of Invitation to Love in Twin Peaks, but from the scenes that we do see, its plotlines seem to eerily mirror the events taking place in the town. Just another subtle layer of very Lynchian metafiction within the show.

Stab in Scream 2
Taking place two years after the events of Scream, Scream 2 begins with Stab, a fictional slasher film that recounts the events of Scream with a star-studded cast. Allegedly directed by Robert Rodriguez and starring Tori Spelling, Luke Wilson, Heather Graham, David Schwimmer and Parker Posey, Stab is the first of a whole franchise of films that exist within the Scream universe, with Stab 8 being a major plot point in Scream (2022).

Angels with Filthy Souls in Home Alone
Most people assume that Angels with Filthy Souls – the film that Kevin McCallister (Macaulay Culkin) watches in Home Alone – is real. An old black-and-white gangster movie, the scene we see from it involves a meeting between two mobsters named Johnny and Snakes and ends with Johnny blasting Snakes to pieces with a Tommy gun, uttering the famous line, “Keep the change, ya filthy animal.” Director Chris Columbus created such a perfect pastiche of gangster films with Angels with Filthy Souls that even Culkin himself admitted in 2018 that he, too, presumed it was a real film.

Plantation Memories in The Watermelon Woman
Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman is often regarded as the first feature film directed by a Black lesbian and revolves around Dunye’s endeavour to uncover the identity of a Black actress, credited only as the Watermelon Woman, in an obscure 1930s film called Plantation Memories. Despite being presented in a semi-documentary style, the whole film is fictional, including Plantation Memories, which, in a similar vein to Angels with Filthy Souls is an uncanny recreation of a period film which looks totally believable.

The Equestrian Vortex in Berberian Sound Studio
In a similar vein to Blow Out, Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio sees Toby Jones playing a sound engineer who is flown to Italy to work on a strange giallo film called The Equestrian Vortex. Throughout, Jones stabs and smashes vegetables to mimic the sounds of the actions on screen. The Equestrian Vortex is an uncanny facsimile of a giallo (even the title is suitably nonsensical) that seems to have something to do with horses and plenty of screaming women.

The Kentucky Fried Movie
An early work from John Landis and the Zucker brothers (pre-Airplane and the Naked Gun movies), The Kentucky Fried Movie is a bonkers presentation of sketches, commercials and fake movie trailers. Parodying everything from disaster movies to blaxploitation, the trailers preview upcoming features such as That’s Armageddon, a disaster movie in which every possible natural disaster seems to happen all at once and Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, an over-the-top parody of the 1970s sexploitation boom.

Mant! in Matinee
In Joe Dante’s Matinee, John Goodman plays a William Castle-style B-movie director who presents his latest feature, Mant! A parody of 1950s creature features, we see a surprising amount of Mant! in Matinee, the plot of which revolves around a man who is mutated into a giant ant. Naturally, a mass panic ensues when the ant man transforms into his final form, a gigantic ant, and begins to attack the city