Ti West’s current hit X follows the cast and crew of a late-1970s porn film whose dreams of home-video glory are gruesomely waylaid while filming in rural Texas. The movie pays homage to horror notables, including The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it’s also part of a subgenre that’s basically “film shoot gone horribly, horribly awry.”
For this list, we’re gathering movies specifically about horror film crews who stumble into actual horror while on the job—and realize the movie they set out to make can’t compare to the real-world terror they find themselves immersed in. Note: this list could be all found-footage titles, but we’re going to mostly focus on narrative films here, with one notable exception.
