10 Best Fake Horror Movies Within Horror Movies

4. Stab

Appears in: Scream 2

The fake film: While most "based on a true story" horrors have barely any relation with the truth, lightweight teen slasher Stab is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of trashy TV reporter Gale Weathers' autobiographical true crime book The Woodsboro Murders and of the high school killing spree that it documents. This even stretches to documenting scenes that Weathers never witnessed with a surprising level of veracity.Tori Spelling stars as Sidney Prescott, menaced by a killer in a ghostface mask, while a twitchy suspicious Luke Wilson as her boyfriend is unsubtly obvious as the killer. Perhaps the biggest star in Stab (Heather Graham) dies right at the start, surprising some audiences. Despite its true life trappings, the film is likely to be more remembered for the copycat killing at a preview screening and a series of increasingly less true to reality sequels.

The real film: Just as Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's original Scream played with the themes and ideas of the slasher genre, so it was inevitable that a sequel about slasher sequels would swiftly follow. Scream 2 finds Sidney (Neve Campbell, who joked in the first film that she would be played by Spelling in a movie of these events) at college and a copycat killer looking sequelise the previous murders.

Easily the most memorable scene, though, is the opening, a meta take on the memorable opening of the first part. Here we see the same scene staged slightly more trashily (and directed by the perennially busy Robert Rodriguez) as the cinema fills with an audience in ghostface costumes, enough that nobody really cares when a murder happens right there.