10 Inside Movie Jokes You Probably Didn’t Get

9. The Howling

The Howling Roger Corman The werewolf movie The Howling is filled with inside jokes. Almost every major character is named after a director of an old werewolf movie, such as George Waggner, who directed the original The Wolf Man, and Terence Fisher, who directed The Curse of the Werewolf. There's also a cameo by Roger Corman, director Joe Dante's mentor, as a man trying to get change out of a telephone booth. This was a slight dig at Corman's infamous cheapness, er, frugalness when it came to filmmaking. Dante himself admitted that he probably had the camera on Corman, playing an incidental character who had nothing at all to do with the plot, a little too long, but he just couldn't help himself. Audiences were probably wondering why he had so much screen time.
Contributor

Michael Perone has written for The Baltimore Sun, Baltimore City Paper, The Island Ear (now titled Long Island Press), and The Long Island Voice, a short-lived spinoff of The Village Voice. He currently works as an Editor in Manhattan. And he still thinks Michael Keaton was the best Batman.