10 More Horror Movies Where Pranks Brutally Backfired

Hard to believe it's almost been a decade since meta-slasher The Final Girls sprayed across our screens. In the intervening years, we've had two new Screams, two Happy Death Days and an array of inferior fumblings with the genre, but still no Final Girls sequel, despite the twist-'n'-tease ending of the original. While that arguably may be the film's most brutal prank, there is, in the words of Yoda, another...

In Camp Bloodbath, the film within a film, slasher villain Billy Murphy (Daniel Norris), who winds up terrorising the characters of both this fictional movie and The Final Girls, is put upon and bullied to the point of life-changing injuries and a dramatic personal transformation.

During the summer of 1957 at Camp Blue Finch, the camp counsellors pull a prank on young Billy (Eric Carney) by throwing firecrackers through the toilet door, burning him, scarring him and leading to months in hospital. Here, he was able to ruminate on his mistreatment and develop an abiding hatred that fuels his subsequent murderous rampage.

This has reverberations throughout Camp Bloodbath, but also leads to the maiming of the Final Girls' contemporary, 'real world' characters when they become trapped in the fiction. That's a lot to digest, but put simply: no prank, no killer, no deaths (and, yeah, also no film).