Special Effects

Special Effects (1984)

Mary Jean is just dying to get in the movies… She's about to get her wish.

Reality and illusion collide as megalomaniacal filmmaker Chris Neville murders a young would-be actress, then sets about making a feature about the deed, casting the deceased's clueless husband as the patsy, and finding a dead ringer to play the late actress.

Date of release
1984-11-16
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (51)
Runtime
1h 46m
Genres
Thriller, Crime
Director
Larry Cohen

Casting

Interesting facts

Special Effects is a 1984 American psychological horror film written and directed by Larry Cohen and starring Zoë Lund and Eric Bogosian. Its plot follows a New York City woman who is cast in a film by a struggling director based on a murder he committed and captured on film.

Production

The screenplay was based on a script titled The Cutting Room that Cohen had written circa 1967. At the time, Cohen had been interested in optioning his screenplay for Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (1969) to Alfred Hitchcock, but instead Universal Studios hired Mark Robson to direct the film.

Filming took place in 1984 New York City. Cohen recalled of shooting the film that stars Lund, Bogosian, and Rijn were "all highly offbeat people who lived in strange basements, had no money, and were highly talented." Commenting on the film in a retrospective interview, Cohen said:

It's my revenge on big budget directors. Eric Bogosian is a director who's washed-up, he's had a couple of flops, he can't get a job any more. But he's got a beautiful house down in the Greenwich Village area, which was a great location to shoot in. He has committed a murder, and photographed it, and now he tries to integrate it into a movie. Eric was actually very nice. We had a fight the first day.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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