The director of 'Gremlins' mastered a now-standard form of horror storytelling.
Today, the concept of horror films containing meta elements is commonplace. Granted, there’s always been a consciousness of the genre within scary movies , but titles like Scream have managed to popularize this further, to the point that projects like It: Chapter 2 will have characters trading dialogue referencing familiar elements from John Carpenter’s The Thing. Many have gone down the meta-horror route. But one of the earliest adopters of this mold is also one of its masters.
While Piranha doesn’t go as meta as later works of Dante, it’s also conscious of the melodramatic tendencies of Jaws knock-offs and, recognizing these hallmarks, opts to utilize them in a maximalist way. It also pays tribute to the very blockbuster that inspired its existence, including its own opening sequence depicting nude teenagers meeting a grisly demise at the hands of underwater beasts.
Throughout The New Batch, the barrier between cinema and reality is wobbly. But it gets utterly annihilated in the middle portion of the story, which focuses on a sequence where the projector showing The New Batch “breaks down” due to the mischievous actions of the Gremlins. This horror movie suddenly puts its story on pause so that a movie theater usher can tap audience member Hulk Hogan on the shoulder to deliver an impassioned speech for these creatures to resume the motion picture.
Though there aren’t any Gremlins or werewolves devouring people in Matinee, this director still finds time to create meta-commentary on influential horror features. It’s also an example of him taking his meta-horror references to the next level. While his works had been conscious of other horror films, The New Batch and Matinee saw Dante ramping things up by having his movies be conscious of behind-the-scenes forces.
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