Dread X: 10 Films That Inspired Daniel Goldhaber’s CAM
Jonathan Barkan
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Daniel Goldhaber’s Cam has become a smash hit in the horror community. With a 94% Rotten Tomato rating, the film is getting rave reviews for its tight and ambitious story, tense presentation, and, notably, star Madeline Brewer’s performance. The film has been a conversation starter for a lot of people and we want to help celebrate it a little more.
That’s why we’ve turned to Goldhaber, the director of Cam, to give us a list of 10 films that directly inspired and influenced writer Isa Mazzei’s film.
This list marks the first in a new weekly series called Dread X where we’ll be getting directors, musicians, writers, and more to share with us Top 10 lists focusing on horror topics that directly relate to their projects…and are just a load of fun!
So join us below as Goldhaber takes you through the films that inspired Cam and make sure to watch it on Netflix!
Dead Ringers
Cronenberg was our biggest guiding light on this project, and this was the movie that made us both fall in love with him. Dead Ringers is about how watching a different version of yourself can drive you absolutely insane. Cronenberg has an amazing knack to fuse his moments of horror directly with both character and theme. The genre moments that make Dead Ringers fun are inseparable from the point of the movie. We wanted to do something similar with the three moments of blood in Cam.
Videodrome
Our second Cronenberg this was a movie we returned to again and again for its representation of technology. We wanted Cam to still play for audiences in thirty
Black Swan
A great doppelgänger movie, but also a great movie about a driven artist pushing herself to the brink. We looked to Black Swan for its speed and thrill, but also for the way that Nina never apologizes for her ambition. We wanted Alice to have the same quality.
Whiplash
This was our other “great artist” movie. “But Whiplash isn’t a horror movie,” you might say, but you’d be wrong. It’s a movie replete with jump scares, and one of the most terrifying, supernatural villains of the last half-decade in J.K. Simmons’ Fletcher. Whiplash is a movie that uses horror and thriller techniques to tell a story about something very grounded that an audience may not otherwise relate to. That’s always how we saw Cam.
Unfriended
A landmark in the representation of screens, me and our editor Daniel Garber looked to Unfriended for guidance on how to represent the two-dimensional screen space of Cam. This is also a great movie for accurately representing the way people talk to each other online.
Requiem For a Dream
Paired with Unfriended. We wanted to take the 2D image space one step further and cut it up into an overwhelming onslaught of montaged information. We also looked to the montages from Requiem as a way to teach the audience about how tips work. It’s a movie in which you track the characters based on numeric rhythmic combinations, and we realized we could do something similar with the tip icons and sound without having to explicitly explain to the audience.
Caché
The first cut of this movie is one of my favorites in all cinema. To me, this is a movie about the untrustworthiness and ambiguity of digital imagery. When you’re looking at a digital image, what do you really see? We looked to this a lot for some of our earlier Lola scenes to confront our audience with the fact that Lola on her show is still Lola regardless of who’s controlling her.
It Follows
This is one of my favorite looking movies of the last few
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
One of the greatest lead female performances, and one of the best examples of a protagonist struggling with a loss of agency over their body and identity. We stole the fan from this movie, as well as a ton of its subjective sound design ideas.
Opening Night
Also not really a horror movie, but a movie replete with enough psychological horror for an entire franchise. This was one of our other main touchstones for our lead protagonist. It’s a movie about a character struggling to maintain the boundaries between her real life and her onstage persona. Ultimately, that is Alice’s struggle in Cam, and Opening Night was our reference for how to communicate that idea with high style and intensity.
