Ever since Scream kind of reinvented the idea, meta-horror has been a rather familiar subgenre. These days, a horror movie barely even feels like a horror movie if one of the characters hasn’t seen Halloween 50 million times or drops in a few references to David Cronenberg or Dario Argento. Netflix’s new film, A Classic Horror Story, looks like it’s built on that skeleton as well, but takes things to a whole other level.
Directed by Roberto De Feo and Paolo Strippoli — with a story by De Feo, Strippoli, Lucio Besana, David Bellini, and Milo Tissone — A Classic Horror Story is a new Italian horror film coming to Netflix on July 14. A teaser was released last month that described it as “Italian Midsommar meets Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and from this trailer, that description is right on the money.
So, so many horror references here. The idea of a group of people in a camper getting stranded is exactly Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Those shots of large groups of cult-like people gathering is exactly like Midsommar. The torture devices bring to mind Saw. The characters directly reference It. There’s a character in some kind of wooden, almost Jason Voorhees type mask. The main character toting a shotgun feels like The Evil Dead. Everyone literally ends up in a cabin in the woods, which is both Cabin in the Woods and about a billion other horror films. The font in the trailer is the font from Halloween. We could go on and on.
We don’t really know much about the film beyond that but the official YouTube description couldn’t be more tantalising: “A camper. A car crash. An abandoned house. Children’s music in the background. Think you’ve seen it before? Look again.” We have no idea what that means but if somehow the film subverts all this in an interesting, scary way, this movie could be special.
A Classic Horror Story comes to Netflix on July 14.