Honourable Mention: The Phantom Eye

The Phantom Eye was a special made for AMC in 1999 and was part of their Halloween run, I understand. It was, all told, a clever little piece directed by Gwyneth Gibby and starring the legendary Roger Corman as Dr Gorman.

The story went a little like this, two interns at AMC, Catherine (Sarah Aldrich) and Joey (David Sean Robinson), are sent down to the horror archive to help Dr Gorman. He has to host the AMC horror special and is meant to be showing a film called the Phantom Eye at midnight. He sends them off into the archives to find the film.

three for the price of one

The two split up and start searching for the film but get transported into actual movies (remakes of horror films made for the special). Gorman informs them that they must survive to escape the movies they are in and move from movie to movie to find the Phantom Eye. Joey is first of all transported into a movie designed to look like a Hammer Dracula. Indeed, at first he meets three brides (Lisa Boyle, Bobbie Chandler & Dina Cox) – although Horror of Dracula, clearly the film being aped, did not feature three brides.

Francois Giorday as Dracula

When Dracula (Francois Giorday) rescues him from the brides he tries to place ‘Harker’ – as he refers to Joey – into a trance with some eye mojo and force him to name the vampire as master and offer him his blood. Joey keeps breaking out of trance, wonders why Dracula is English and then realises that he is carrying a cross, with which he defeats Dracula and escapes that particular movie. The other genre interest references occur later on when Horror at Party Beach and the Thing from Another World are given name-checks.

The imdb page is here.