Released in theatres today, director J. J. Abrams’ kids-vs-monster thriller Super 8 is an open homage to Steven Spielberg’s heart-and-awe blockbusters of the late ’70s and early ’80s. (No surprise, then, that Spielberg is on board as a producer.) Super 8 is intentionally set in 1979, and plays off the advances and limitations of that era’s answer to “cutting edge” video documentation — per the movie’s title, Super 8 film. In this regard it’s comparable to the Abrams-produced horror film Cloverfield, which used handheld digital video cameras to not just tell its story, but also unveil its monster.

The basic plot involves a gaggle of adolescents who, in the process of shooting their own backyard blockbuster, unintentionally film a military train crash. When their playback footage seems to show something escaping from the crash, the kids decide to investigate, risking their own lives while trying to save their small town from the mysterious, lurking entity.

The film-within-a-film is a favourite storytelling device for moviemakers. It’s often used as the hook for a satirical look at the movie-making industry, whether in a broad comedy like 1999’s Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy spoof Bowfinger, or a darker, more cynical look at Hollywood, like Robert Altman’s 1992 classic The Player. Beyond the self-referential navel gazing, though, the trope is tailor-made for thrills and action. Super 8 seems poised to join an impressive list of stories about filmmakers who risk or even lose their lives to attempt to make some cinemagic.

Here are just three stellar past examples in this suspenseful genre of meta-movies:

The Blair Witch Project (1999)
The aforementioned Cloverfield was supposedly composed entirely from “found” home video footage of a giant creature’s rampage through Manhattan. This found-footage conceit was borrowed from a much lower-budget horror flick, the shoestring indie success of 1999, The Blair Witch Project. In Blair Witch, a trio of film students heads into the Maryland woods to document a local legend surrounding a woman exiled for practicing witchcraft, only to find — too late to save themselves — that the terrifying tale is much more fact than folktale. Blair Witch became a mainstream movie breakthrough for micro-budgets, improvised acting, and the sometimes thrilling, sometimes nauseating, shaky-cam aesthetic.

Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
A fictionalized tale of the events surrounding the real-life making of the 1922 creepfest Nosferatu (a masterful, expressionist, silent adaption of Dracula), Shadow of the Vampire was an original high-concept film that had teeth and guts. The film’s premise, which sounds like a recipe for either outright horror or the broadest of comedies, is that Nosferatu’s eerie vampire, Count Orlok, was played by a real undead blood-sucker, and that the film-within-the-film is actually more documentary than fiction. Director E. Elias Merhige and writer Steven Katz, assisted by brilliant performances from John Malkovich as director F.W. Murnau and Willem Dafoe as the mysterious Max Schreck, take an inside joke for film geeks and turn it into a strange, funny and sometimes touching flick about the things artists must be willing to sacrifice (including colleagues’ lives) in pursuit of art.

Tropic Thunder (2008)
Although this Ben Stiller/Jack Black/Robert Downey Jr. action comedy blurs the lines between real and “reel” life, Tropic Thunder is played for big laughs, and big explosions. A burnt-out director takes a quartet of self-loving actors deep into the jungles of Southeast Asia, planning to shoot a gritty, guerrilla-style combat flick. When the shooting starts, though, it comes from the assault rifles of actual guerrillas, and not the cameras — although the deluded thespians assume all their agonies are being dutifully captured by unseen cinematographers. Tropic Thunder is an unusual meta-movie, because the deadly serious war arc suggested by the title barely sees a single frame put to celluloid during the whole course of the story. And while the flick takes aim at the inflated egos of Hollywood stars, it feels like the filmmakers here want to have it both ways, showing that while H-woodies may be narcissistic idiots, they are still willing to really suffer to entertain you.

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Images courtesy of Paramount (Super 8), Haxan (The Blair Witch Project), Lions Gate (Shadow of the Vampire) and DreamWorks (Tropic Thunder)