In an age of smartphone reliance, social media misinformation, and wholly inflammatory news networks, the lines separating truth and fiction are becoming increasingly blurred. Echoing this, the horror genre has over time only gone further with the premise of spooky storytelling as plot device or even antagonist. We call these meta-horror films, and they come in many different forms.

A character in a horror-comedy might know about the formulas of scary movies, including real films that you, the viewer, have seen. And this knowledge can influence their actions to both effective or disastrous ends. Elsewhere, a film may satirize the very appeal of horror movies, especially the kind based around specific archetypal characters ritualistically being killed off one by one. Why are we drawn to stories of friends at a spooky cabin in the woods? Why does there have to be a lone survivor, and why are they usually a certain type of person?

The history of horror cinema’s relationship to real-world events can also be explored in such winking films. For example, there’s the matter of how the Cold War and nuclear arms race directly influenced a wave of American monster movies in the 1950s and 1960s, where the onscreen creatures frightened a generation of kids just as much as the nightly news–as seen in Joe Dante’s Matinee(1993). And finally, there are films that toy with the reassuring concept that you’re only watching a movie; where something terrifying being confined to a screen doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t get you. After all, one of the most iconic scary sequences of the last 25 years, from Japanese horror Ring (1998), sees a character petrified as a nightmarish figure, previously relegated to a mysterious video, breaks free from the television screen and into their reality. And who’s to say this monster isn’t coming for you next. Keep telling yourself it’s only a movie. Are you sure about that…?