A horror filmmaker describes an alleged Hollywood rip-off.
In 1989, the aspiring filmmaker Rolfe Kanefsky, who was then 19 years old, cobbled together $100,000 to make his dream movie. Thus, the first self-aware, meta-textual horror film was born. Although There’s Nothing Out There was groundbreaking and garnered the attention of high-ranking studio executives, due to a series of unfortunate events, it tanked at the box office. It was dead on arrival.
Charlie Lyne, a documentary filmmaker, first saw There’s Nothing Out There as a horror-obsessed teenager. “It really stuck with me,” he told The Atlantic . “Here was this oddball forerunner to [Wes Craven’s] Scream. ” And yet There’s Nothing Out There preceded it by at least five years. Why wasn’t this film internationally renowned?
When Lyne looked into it, he encountered a book published by Kanefsky, in which he describes showing his screenplay to Craven’s son, who had promised to show it to his father.
