I like my Horror Meta. Especially when it’s HEAVY Meta 🤘
*cue the explosions*
*turn the guitars up to 11*
*crowd surf across a zombie horde*
Indonesian Horror-Comedy The Draft! is maybe one of the most meta movies ever made. It turns the genre inside out, skewering every trope and cliche in the playbook- including a couple extra specific to low-budget Indonesian classics. The setup is familiar, but intentionally so. Heck, you could probably guess all the characters right now without any hints. We got: 1 pretty-faced jock, one badass b*tch, a film school nerd with a camera, a biology student, an overly dramatic tough guy, and a girl whose #1 priority is to look shocked and traumatized from start to finish. We drop those college-aged kids in a remote location with a slightly creeper caretaker and shit gets weirder and weirder until they all realize that something just isn’t quite right. Maybe, just maybe they’re…trapped in a Horror movie!
“The Draft! is Next Level Meta”
Sure, that’s all par for the course when it comes to modern meta movies, but The Draft! goes one step further into madness, separating itself from the rest of the pack in one genius move. These characters aren’t just stuck in the Horror movie. They’re stuck in an unproduced screenplay that’s being rewritten while they’re still in it! Needless to say, it’s hard to fight a ghost when it’s suddenly transformed into a mob of the undead. Or when the dead friends you’ve been grieving are suddenly alive again because it made more sense for them to get killed later in the script.
The Draft! is Next Level Meta. Not only are we watching archetypal cabin-in-the-woods characters fight for survival, but we also break away from the story to see the writer toiling over his own bad screenplay. He gets phone calls from a producer saying the project is no good, he dramatically rips up pages or tosses the whole thing in the garbage. And all the while, the characters of his story are trying to figure out what kind of subgenre they’re currently in, constantly criticizing their creator like some pathetic unimaginative hacky God.
“Maybe one of the most meta movies ever made […] a love letter to the genre!”
Fans of Indonesian Horror especially will find no shortage of fun easter eggs in The Draft!, calling out kooky tropes specific to those films, but it’s really a movie for all Horror fans. We knew the rules to survive a Horror movie before Scream (1996) let the rest of the world in the secret. We didn’t need Cabin in The Woods to tell us that damn near every horror movie was a choose-your-own-adventure game of death until the bad guy showed up. And we certainly didn’t need Rubber to remind us that tires can occasionally become sentient and kill us with the power of their minds.
Written and directed by Yusron Fuadi, The Draft! is a love letter to a genre that is always being picked apart, re-tooled, re-worked, and re-invented, and the creative process is as much a part of the story these days as the finished project. Meta horror movies are a dime a dozen and it’s hard to find a new avenue in but hot damn! Fuadi and the cast really pulled it off. The Draft! rips open the world of Horror movies in clever and creative ways that we have not yet seen. It’s self-deprecating, self-aware, and made with a genuine love for its own faults.
“The Draft! rips open the world of Horror movies in clever and creative ways…”
Yusron Fuadi’s The Draft! celebrated its International premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024. Click HERE to follow our continued coverage of the fest, and be sure to let us know what you would do if you suddenly realized that you were trapped in a Horror movie over in the official Nightmare on Film Street Discord!
