10 Brilliantly Self Aware Wes Craven Cameos

A couple of years before Scream, Craven had already worked on a meta-fictional horror movie about horror movies, a film that paid tribute to his early work while also breaking new ground. New Nightmare, the first Nightmare On Elm Street film that Craven had directed since the first, is by some margin the best of the sequels, managing to make Freddy scary again and actually do something original with the character.

The film involves the likes of Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund playing themselves in a world in which Freddy is the embodiment of an ancient evil that needs the Nightmare films to keep being made in order to cross over into reality. (Or more movies need to be made to stop him, it's never completely clear).

The high concept was pretty novel at the time and required quite a bit of exposition and background, meaning that the pace does get killed a little in order to have Craven come on and explain just what's going on in by far his most substantial screen appearance. Still, how many other horrors are bold enough to have the director actually show up to explain his plot?