One of my very favorite things in movies is when movie characters go to the movies. It shouldn't be that entertaining to watch people watch movies, and yet this kind of thing never fails to give me a little thrill. I suppose the first time I was aware of this kind of meta experience was in The Blob (1956), when Steve McQueen and his prankster friends take in a horror double bill in a Pennsylvania cinema where the Blob turns up unexpectedly. If you haven't seen it, it's great… against the old timey atmosphere of the creepy black and white chiller onscreen (Daughter of Horror… and that's Ed McMahon's voice you're hearing from the film), the Blob enters the projection booth, consumes the projectionist, and begins oozing out of a wall diffuser into the cinema itself.

Movies at the movies is a great conceit for horror and science fiction, because there is something about going into a movie theater, especially one unfamiliar to you, that suggests entering the unknown – this was especially true in the days when cinemas tended to be big, cathedral-type places, with lots of velour and carved columns, sort of like a cross between a bordello and a funeral parlor. There was something innately creepy about putting your back to daylight and entering into that hushed darkness. Some horror films exploit this lingering fear of public places. In The Omega Man (1971), last man on earth Charlton Heston grabs the best seat in the house to watch Woodstock (1970). In the obscure Messiah of Evil (1972), Joy Bang slips into an empty cinema to watch what seems to be a spaghetti western (starring Sammy Davis, Jr., no less) only to have all of the rows fill up silently behind her with creepy local types who eventually rush her to tear her apart. In Jean Rollin's sexy French vampire movie Lips of Blood (1975), the main character goes to a Paris cinema showing Rollin's earlier The Nude Vampire (1971). In John Landis' madcap An American Werewolf in London (1981), shapeshifting tourist David Naughton has a blackly comic meeting with a number of his victims while a porn reel plays blithely on the screen. In the Italian gorefest Demons (1985), a theater full of patrons comes under attack from a ghoul-infected prostitute who literally bursts through the screen to infect one poor soul after another, turning each of them into a frothing, ravening thingie. Oh, it's good fun! In Scream 2 (1997), characters die while seeing a cinematic depiction of the events that transpired in the original Scream (1996). Well, what goes around really does come around.

On the other end of the spectrum, movies-within-movies do turn up in non-genre films. Remember the first scene in Play It Again, Sam (1972) and that big close up of Woody Allen watching the end of Casablanca (1942) slackjawed with awe? (A decade or so later, Allen would have a movie character step out of the screen, to the shock and delight of moviegoer Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo.) In the haunting, heartbreaking Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive (1973), a little girl living in the provinces during the Spanish Civil War has her life changed when she attends a local screening of Frankenstein (1931). There's a funny scene in the Oscar-winning Save the Tiger (1973) in which bankrupt fashion house owners Jack Lemmon and Jack Gilford meet arsonist Thayer David in a cinema showing Swedish soft core in order to broker a deal. As Lemmon maladroitly goes through the handover of an envelope full of cash, the always-sinister Thayer David keeps admonishing him "Watch the picture." In Cooley High (1975), a gaggle of inner city kids hook up inside a Chicago cinema to catch a Godzilla film, only to have a fight break out. The fisticuffs carry up onto the stage, where the combatants duke it out behind the screen… and ultimately crash right through it. In Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear (1991), Nick Nolte and family are kept from fully engaging with a screening of Problem Child (1990) by the noisy guy smoking a big cigar in the row in front of them… who turns out to be vengeful sociopath Robert DeNiro, of course. (Years earlier, DeNiro's Taxi Driver had tried rather ill-advisedly to take blue blooded Cybil Shepard to a porn theater, also the setting for a surveillance scene in Scorsese's recent The Departed.) In Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), a hushed dialogue scene plays out in a futuristic cinema showing The Wizard of Oz (1939).

There are so many examples of movie characters going to the movies, particularly during the 1940s, when one's local movie house became a crossworlds to the world, where people found out (via newsreels) what was going on. And don't even get me started on movie scenes set at a drive-in… oh, I could write a blog.