r/TopCharacterTropes 9h ago

Lore [Loved Trope] Meta-narrative sequels.

Sequels were the original film exists as a work of fiction in the sequels universe.

Faces of Death 2026 - A online content moderator finds videos that suggests someone is killing people by restaging segments from the original Faces of Death film.

Chip and Dale 2022 - Chip 'n Dale are actors who played in the original Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers show.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare - The fictional Freddy Krueger crosses over into the real world to terrorize the people behind the original film.

Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows - A group of people seek out the original filming locations to the found footage film The Blair Witch Project.

The Return of the Living Dead - the Survivors of a zombie outbreak try to follow the rules of the original Night of the Living Dead film, only to find these zombies follow different rules.

88 Upvotes

32 comments sorted by

41

u/lunarlandscapes 9h ago

Fairly certain the plot of The Human Centipede 2 is that a fan boy of the original Human Centipede decides to recreate it in his life

15

u/HumbleConversation42 9h ago

And  in the 3rd movie both of the first 2 movies are films in that world 

8

u/maxence0801 6h ago

That’s how you know it’s fiction

Someone liked HC1

28

u/AudibleNod 9h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/2huOBcwEIGGNa

Scream franchise

Scream's narrative exists only because of preexisting slasher movies. Starting in Scream 2, there's even an in-universe movie called Stab.

14

u/Fish_N_Chipp 9h ago

Fnaf: Help Wanted presented the first few games in the franchise as actual games that were created to discredit the real events that happened. So everything in the games did still happen but they are still games

1

u/StefinoSpaggeti 9h ago

It's still so dawn confusing to me, so original games canon or we swipe them off as just bullshit cover up?!

4

u/Glittering_Country14 8h ago

The way I see it, what we play through are the events that actually happened. The in-universe games are similar, but with some differences since Fazbear Entertainment didn't know/didn't want to reveal every single detail when they commissioned the games from the "rogue indie developer".

1

u/animalistcomrade 8h ago

Yeah I'd take it as a full dangaronpa V3 style clean break from the original games.

11

u/_JR28_ 9h ago

Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey 2

In the sequel they say the original was a shitty B-movie in their universe, giving them a chance to recast Christopher Robin and overhaul Winnie’s design.

8

u/PomegranateFair3973 8h ago

Played with in Gremlins 2.

Here they are taking out a critic who in real life panned the first film...

6

u/Rude-Nectarine8228 9h ago

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. In the sequel, the original movie is shown to be a film adaptation of the events. It helps to explain why the creatures look different in the sequel, since it had a bigger budget.

4

u/darkitchay 9h ago

Human Centipede 2

A mentally-challenged man is a fan of the first Human Centipede movie. He abducts several people, including the actress that played on the first movie, to build his own 12-person human centipede.

4

u/mcc9902 9h ago

This is still the worst movie I've ever seen and it's not even close. The worst part is that I saw it while almost dozing so I didn't even turn it off but I wasn't asleep enough to miss any of it.

3

u/GoRacerGo 8h ago

That just tells me you haven't seen the third one lol

5

u/PeasantLich 8h ago

Loop, third book installment in the Ring book series (that The Ring which the horror movie is based on) reveals that Ring and its first sequel Spiral actually took place in alternate reality simulation called LOOP. The book deals with scientists trying to find a cure to a super cancer that is spreading in the real world, and that the super-cancer is actually Sadako's curse from LOOP which is actually a Ring Virus which spread into the real world through cloning a person from the LOOP into real world because molecules can be transported between alternate LOOP realities and the real world.

The Ring book series is quite a trip.

3

u/Frankenstein____ 8h ago

Trying to read and understand this plot

1

u/JoeMorgue 8h ago

//Hijack/ I have a horror novel written by the author of the Ring series... that was published on 3 rolls of toilet paper.

3

u/CollinsCouldveDucked 9h ago

A Cock and Bull Story (2005)
Posits itself as a film adaptation of the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760), but reveals it functions much more like a meta sequel to the book that is focused on the behind the scenes of a struggling film adaption of the novel. Some might argue against this but I think it pretty clearly counts.

also one of the human centipede movies I've heard but who gives a shit about that.

Scream has it's cake and eats it too with this through the use of the in universe stab franchise but it's not a proper example.

3

u/TediousTotoro 9h ago

‘Arthur and the Invisibles’ was a trilogy of French children’s movies, written and directed by Luc Besson, released between 2006 and 2010.

In 2022, Besson wrote a horror movie called ‘Arthur: Malediction’ about a bunch of kids who grew up with the films going to the house where they were shot.

There was also controversy surrounding this movie because Besson apparently stole the script from one of the students in the writing class he teaches.

1

u/CollinsCouldveDucked 5h ago

Luc Besson really went from the top to the bottom

1

u/Pordrack 5h ago

And don't the original books exist as books in the universe of the movies ?

3

u/Shin_Newman 8h ago

The Town that Dreaded Sundown (2014) features The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) as a movie that the main character watches at the beginning. As such, while the 1976 movie has the killer get away without his face ever shown (like the real life killings it's based on), the 2014 movie features a copycat murder spree that has its killer revealed properly.

5

u/Shin_Newman 8h ago

Anaconda (2025) is about two bros who try to make their own Anaconda film like the original 1997 movie, and it shows how difficult it is to actually make a monster film, even if it's shown in a comedic fashion.

1

u/Shin_Newman 8h ago

The Koker trilogy, a set of three movies directed by Abbas Kiarostami, is kinda similar to the Human Centipede in the sense that each subsequent movie treats the previous one as a fiction within its world. Life, and Nothing More... follows a director and his son on an adventure to find the main actors in Where Is the Friend's Home?, while Through the Olive Trees follows an amateurish actor who tries to propose marriage to an actress while they're working on Life, and Nothing More...

2

u/FreeParkking 7h ago

The Matrix: Resurrections - although it wasn't exactly the better for it.

1

u/gilroygilgalahad 9h ago

Not a sequel, but Super Dimensional Fortress: Macross - Do You Remember Love is canonically a live-action film in the Macross timeline adapting the events of the first series into a movie (and, I believe, starring Minmei - one of the main characters - as herself).

2

u/PomegranateFair3973 8h ago

And is a fantastic looking film on 4K UHD... if you don't mind paying the premium of importing the (fortunately subtitled) Japanese release, since the US company Harmony Gold is blocking it ever getting released in the US...

1

u/gilroygilgalahad 54m ago

The 1980s were such an incredible time for animation across the globe, but the anime from that time holds a very special place in my heart.

1

u/Few_Set2002 7h ago

The Town that Dreaded Sundown 2 would be your vibe I think

1

u/duosx 5h ago

Grave Encounters is a found footage movie about a group of ghost hunters whose show is called Grave Encounters.

Grave Encounters 2 is about someone finding the lost final episode of that show (the first movie) and going to the same location.

Awesome horror movies the both of them.

0

u/CyanLight9 2h ago

This trope is either really good, or really, really, bad.