Prepare for “MaXXXine” by watching these ten other must-see films about the perils of Hollywood excess and the thin veneer of glamour.
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A peek beneath the glitz and glamour of The City of Angels often reveals Los Angeles’s sleazy underbelly – and in Hollywood, reality is never quite what it seems. In anticipation of Ti West’s upcoming movie MaXXXine, here are the 10 Hollywood horror films where lust, ambition, and the undying desire for fame have terrifying consequences.
1. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (#15 on our list of “25 Films Deserving of Genre Status) is a classic for a reason. Two aging child stars who happen to be sisters – played by formidable Hollywood queens Bette Davis (Jane) and Joan Crawford (Blanche) – live together unhappily in Robert Aldrich’s film. Jane is devoted to making Blanche’s life as miserable as possible. Their sibling rivalry, which is partially fueled by Jane’s jealousy of Blanche’s considerable success as an actress, ramps up into a sick game of murder and manipulation.
2. Mulholland Drive (2001)
Questions are asked in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive but rarely answered. The film centers around the strange romance between Betty (a powerful Naomi Watts), an innocent young woman who has come to L.A. to become a star, and Rita (Laura Elena Harring), a beautiful amnesiac with a troubled past. The two women search for clues to Rita’s identity, which only leads them into a nightmarish world of real and imagined monsters, heartbreak, death, and uncertainty. As the women’s identities become less stable, the film becomes more surreal – and horrifying.
3. Hellbent (2004)
A group of gay and bisexual men are psyched for the annual West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval. Even the news that a serial killer is stalking and murdering queer men in Los Angeles is not enough to dampen the friends’ enthusiasm. Unfortunately for this group (anchored by stars Dylan Fergus and Bryan Kirkwood), they’ve caught the eye of the killer, and now he won’t stop until he ends them all. Hellbent, which was written and directed by Paul Etheredge, is a fun and gruesome ride through the queer Halloween experience in West Hollywood.
4. Scream 3 (2000)
While Wes Craven’s Scream 3 is a darkly funny and meta take on Hollywood and horror films, its themes are genuinely unsettling. Roman Bridger (played by a goofily perfect Scott Foley) is directing Stab 3, Hollywood’s lightly fictionalized version of the Ghostface murders. As people associated with the film are murdered one by one, infamous final girl Sidney Prescott must step up to unmask Scream 3’s Ghostface. When she does, she learns how enmeshed her family was in the darker side of Hollywood, leading to one of the most disturbing revelations in the Scream franchise.
5. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994)
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare opens with a very Los Angeles experience: an earthquake, one of the five that has rocked the city in three weeks. Taking the meta-movie experience of Scream 3 a step further, this movie features Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and Wes Craven playing themselves. As Craven’s nightmares find their way into a new Freddy Krueger script, they also become a horrifying reality for Langenkamp. This film’s scares creep out from the chasm between art and reality… and between sleep and waking.
6. Nightcrawler (2014)
Dan Gilroy’s film Nightcrawler captures the nauseating reality of what happens when true crime meets with Americans’ bloodlust for tabloid stories of pain and misery. Jake Gyllenhaal turns in an exceptionally creepy performance as Lou, a photojournalist who will stop at nothing to get the most gruesome shots possible of death and destruction. Lou is the personification of a culture that has not lost its taste for real-life tragedy – the bloodier, the better.
7. Starry Eyes (2014)
Written and directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, Starry Eyes follows Sarah (Alexandra Essoe), a naïve young starlet, as she tries to break into Hollywood. After a harrowing audition for a movie called The Silver Scream, she becomes obsessed with the film. Very quickly, the cult-like production company Astraeus Pictures begins taking advantage of Sarah’s vulnerability and willingness to sacrifice everything to be a star. While Starry Eyes has a healthy dose of gag-inducing body horror, the most terrifying part is how young hopefuls are treated in the harsh entertainment industry.
8. The Neon Demon (2016)
Elle Fanning stars as Jesse, an aspiring teen model, in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon. Jesse’s youthful beauty quickly turns her into a rising star on the runway, but less successful, passed-over models haunt L.A. like ghosts. The pervasive rot of their jealousy lurks under the surface, and sexual predators hide in plain sight, turning Jesse’s dreamy career into a surreal nightmare. (Fanning’s costar Jena Malone won Best Supporting Actress at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards for her unforgettable performance as a troubled makeup artist in The Neon Demon.)
9. Body Double (1984)
Brian De Palma’s erotic thriller Body Double is like two movies in one. During the first half, down-on-his-luck actor Scully (Craig Wasson) is cheated on by his wife, emotionally tortured by his manipulative acting teacher, and entranced by a scantily clad woman who dances every night in her apartment—an apartment Scully has a perfect view of from the house he’s renting in the Hollywood Hills. After he witnesses a murder, a strange clue carries him down the rabbit hole of L.A.’s adult film industry, and he begins to question if everyone he knows is who they appear to be.
10. The Invitation (2015)
Unspoken grief and strained relationships combine to make director Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation an incredibly unnerving psychological thriller. Old friends (and former lovers) gather in the Hollywood Hills for a dinner party full of sexual tension, drugs, and an invitation from the hosts to join their cult, The Invitation, to process their grief. John Carroll Lynch is at his most terrifying as Pruitt, one of the cult members, and Lindsay Burdge as the mysterious Sadie expertly conjures up one of Charlie Manson’s “girls” who went on murderous rampages in the very area where The Invitation takes place.
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