10 Best Fake Horror Movies Within Horror Movies
1. The Equestrian Vortex
Appears in: Berberian Sound Studio
The fake film: Director Giancarlo Santini, working with regular producer Francesco Coraggio, claims that The Equestrian Vortex (Il Vortice Equestre) is not a horror film, it is "a Santini film". Make no mistake, though, this is a film full of disturbing images of torture, witchcraft and, at one point, a dangerously aroused goblin. Santini's film bears comparison with leading Italian horror purveyors like Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.
More based around distressing imagery and sequences of disturbing gore than on a strong central narrative, The Equestrian Vortex focuses on the students at a riding school (much like the ballet school in Argento's Suspiria) who are tormented by the spirits of witches tortured and murdered by the inquisition and that is about it as far as plot goes. Mostly its an excuse for Santini to pile on the torture and an impressively traumatic soundtrack.
The real film: Surprisingly, Blow Out is not the only thriller where a sound engineer working on a horror film is caught up in his own nightmare, but Toby Jones in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio is suffering a much more intimate, claustrophobic trauma in a film that is much more insular and psychological. Jones' emotionally repressed Gilderoy is like the protagonists in many Italian horrors, an anglophone lost and alienated amongst Italian speakers like the gregarious and pushy Santini (Antonio Mancino) and Francesco (Cosimo Fusco).
Most of the film focuses on Gilderoy's recording of witchy voiceovers and foley effects from bashing and slicing vegetables to represent all of The Equestrian Vortex's slashing and slicing. As Gilderoy slowly unravels mentally while being bombarded by images from the film, his fractured disconnect with reality is reflected by the narratively incoherent madness on screen.
Unlike, say, La Fin Absolue Du Monde, the greatest strength of The Equestrian Vortex is that we never see it on screen beyond the opening credits. Strickland, thus, leaves the horrors within the film to the audience's imagination and that's what makes it the best fake horror of all.