No, what it's actually doing is mixing the "self-aware of horror tropes in a horror movie" style of movies like Scream or Cabin In The Woods with the found footage genre. The found footage artifice is a behind the scenes documentary of the making of a shitty found footage movie IN THREE DEE. The filmmakers in charge of Spectre Of Death, the in-universe movie, are right there with you saying shit like the opening titles are cliche, or that the movie needs a big innovative dumb hook like Sharknado had. The people making this found footage movie know the pitfalls and the tropes of the genre, and alternate between emulating them and trying to avoid them. Director Derek is an absolute narcissist of a creator who comes up with the dumbest shit imaginable and lazily tries to justify it by saying shit like "well how would the audience know that?" and calling us dumb motherfuckers for eating this shit up. We're meant to dislike him, and boy howdy do I. He's an antagonistic selfish filmmaker prone to angry outbursts against his cast and crew, and he can't come up with an ending without making himself look good. He tries to make himself sole survivor of the movie, but nobody's having it. Found footage rules, man. Everybody dies. The negativity on set only swells as actual creepy shit starts to happen. Kids, you're not just making a found footage movie. You're in one.
There's a wonderful scene wherein Derek is trying to write the ending, and the producer helpfully critiques that he's explaining way too much about the monster. They have a big waffle about explanation vs ambiguity in these movies, and Derek's eventually only swayed on the side of ambiguity because it means he can explain more shit in the sequel and get 15 bucks a head 'cause it's 3D. The movie itself, however, gets to have its cake and eat it too. It explains the themes and motivations of Spectre Of Death plain as day to you. It's up to you, dear viewer, to think critically and apply those themes and motivations to Found Footage 3D. The artifice of this being a found footage movie about making a different found footage movie means it gets to explain the inner one and leave the outer shell vague when the shit hits the fan. This even gets signposted early on, when the film crew put up some old guys on a bench to do the stereotypical horror movie thing where they ask for directions and the guys say "oooh, stay away, that place is baaaaad". When they then cut from making the movie and mention in conversation where they really are going, the old guys actually tell them to stay away unironically because it's a bad place. A real found footage movie happening inside a fake one. Or, to put it another way, the fake one poking out of its box and influencing the real one.
Yes, what you've got here is a good old-fashioned case of metafiction. Spectre Of Death is all about the crumbling marriage of characters Derek and Amy, played by the director and his ex-wife. Specifically it's about how the negative emotion of their breakup creates a supernatural demon that terrorizes them before ultimately killing them both, but not before helpfully leaving the expensive 3D camera behind for someone to find and show to the audience later. As a found footage movie plot, it's utter stock bullshit. The interesting thing is how you can read it. Shudder's synopsis of the movie seems to agree with this reading, but the movie never explains it in lengthy exposition like Derek would want. Throughout the movie we see the negative tensions on set, and the real raw angry emotion between the ex-lovers as they try to make the film. Pair that with filming in an actual cabin in the woods where murder happened, and bang. The fictional negative energy demon from Spectre Of Death is now haunting the cast and crew of Found Footage 3D. Things escalate worse and worse, and that leads us to our final act with the terrified documentarian running from a murder ghost in the woods while holding his camera.
Earlier in the movie, the producer mentions that a good found footage movie has to answer two questions. One, why is the cameraman filming? Two, to paraphrase: Why the fuck is the cameraman STILL filming when nightmare ghosts or goblins are trying to kill them? Spectre Of Death answers the first quickly, but never gets to answer the second because Found Footage 3D goes ass up with ghosts and murder. Found Footage 3D answered the first question with the making-of documentary. Its answer to the second question is that the goddamned phantom or spectre or whatever the fuck can only be seen via a camera, and thus documentarian Mark has to use it to see if the damn thing is trying to murder him as he tries to get away. It's a unique answer, only playing on the metafictional artifice. Of course the ghost wants to be filmed. It's broken free of one movie and wants to be in another. The end scene, with Amy and Mark in a wrecked van, even plays to this. Amy, possessed, asks for the camera to be on her. That's the ghost, that's her fictional negative energy made manifest wanting its final close-up. Her last line is all about the first rule of found footage movies, she goes monster in 3D, cut to credits. Found Footage 3D is definitely interesting, to say the least. It's got this shimmer of metafiction behind it, and the nesting of one found footage movie within the other lets it poke at the common tropes of bad ones in really interesting ways that I haven't seen before. It really didn't need the 3D, but if that got it greenlit, so be it. I enjoyed it for what it was.
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