‘There’s Nothing Out There’: the movie that was ripped off by ‘Scream’
Somewhere in between the Hitchcock heyday of the 1960s and the move towards more comedic horror in the 1990s and 2000s, there was a cultural chasm. It was a time when rom-coms reigned supreme, and adventure franchises like Indiana Jones were making huge box office wins. There wasn’t much space for horror beyond straight-up thrillers like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. No one had dared to mix horror with other genres, keeping it in its own terrifying lane. You might think all that changed in 1996 when Wes Craven’s Scream hit the screens to significant success as it became the highest-grossing slasher of all time. But what if we said there was a precursor to Scream, one that Wes Craven borrowed ideas from?
Scream is beloved for its hyper-aware style, both buying into and making fun of horror tropes. From Drew Barrymore’s infamous opening scene that references the Hitchcock starlets to Jamie Kennedy’s repeated meta-textual deconstruction of horror movie stapes, Scream shot to success for being a witty, intelligent film that wasn’t afraid to make fun of itself. Wes Craven became heralded as a horror pioneer, but does he deserve all the credit?
Years before the release of Scream, a 19-year-old aspiring filmmaker called Rolfe Kanefsky raised enough money to make his debut picture, There’s Nothing Out There. With only $100,000 and a dream, he set about to make the first self-aware horror film about a group of friends on holiday in a cabin in the woods. His protagonist, Mike, played by Craig Peck, is a horror movie fanatic who spends the whole trip picking up on horror tropes and attempting to warn his friends about the danger lurking. When the horror hits, he has to use his movie knowledge to survive. Sound familiar?
But the similarities between There’s Nothing Out There and Scream even boil down to a scene-by-scene basis. At points, Jamie Kennedy’s character, Randy, is almost a carbon copy of Mike, with both characters having a nearly identical conversation in a video store about horror movies and delivering lines that are just different enough to avoid direct plagiarism calls. While Mike says, “Name a horror film, any horror film”, with dismay, Randy says, “This is standard horror movie stuff”. He leaves documentary maker Charlie Lyne to research the connection between the movies deeper, calling There’s Nothing Out There the “oddball forerunner to Scream”. Diving into the mystery of the two films, Charlie Lyne’s short documentary Copycat points out the multitude of similarities between the movies.
As it turns out, a young Rolfe Kanefsky had given Wes Craven’s son Jonathan a copy of the screenplay with the promise he’d show his father. Could it be that Scream is nothing but a rip-off, with major player Wes Craven using his studio connections and bigger budget only to simply steal a plot from an unknown talent? Hard to say definitively, but the comparisons feel warranted.
The most significant difference between the films is the level of notoriety. While Scream went on to become a global horror franchise, being held up as one of the best horror movies ever made as a pioneering piece, There’s Nothing Out There flopped. Too ahead of its time, no one wanted to take a risk on such a meta piece until Scream came along with all the same ideas but a bigger cast. Slowly gaining a cult fan base, There’s Nothing Out There, alongside the documentary Copycat, was presented by MUBI, shining a light on the forgotten flick.
But was Rolfe Kanefsky bitter about how things turned out? Did he fight against Scream? No. Kanefsky never contacted the Cravens and simply moved on to writing more and more horror films. But now, 34 years later, it’s nice to see his smart yet silly debut picture get its flowers and begin to crawl out of the Scream shadow that has hidden it for too long.
