It’s hard (if not impossible sometimes) to find the perfect formula for a movie. Especially since the genre you want to approach is so popular that it seems to have exhausted all the resources of originality. This is, in fact, the subject of the short film ‘The Greatest Horror Film Ever Made‘ which depicts the more or less hilarious attempts of a director to create a successful project. Unfortunately, the process is more difficult than one might think, since creating a horror film involves the constant struggle with the genre clichés and the respect for the “unwritten laws” of the guild that prevent the director from always following their instinct. Basically, Brandon Jordan creates in this project a kind of meta-narrative, through which he opposes the real plan (the director’s struggle with their own story) and the fictional plan (the mental projection of the cinematographic matter), in order to finally capture the disastrous formula of an artistic process that leads to nothing. There is a lot of irony and self-irony in this short film since the director seems to be inspired by a personal experience with the demands of such a story, but this is precisely its great quality. In other words, a failed film project can turn into something good as long as it is subjected to a process of deconstruction, to a detached gaze that illustrates not the false cohesion of its components, but their incompatibility, which, compared to the imposed criteria of the cinematic tradition, express, in fact, the superficiality of (almost) any similar attempt.
