Special Effects is a 1984 American horror thriller film directed by Larry Cohen and starring Zoë Lund and Eric Bogosian.

Andrea escapes the interrogation, fleeing to the home of Christopher Neville, a film director who has promised her a role in his upcoming picture.

Neville is a disgruntled filmmaker who has recently returned to New York from Los Angeles after his last film was cancelled over budgetary disputes.

At a local Salvation Army, Keefe meets Elaine Bernstein, a directionless woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Andrea.

Neville brutally strangles Leon Gruskin, a snarky film lab assistant, to death before having dinner with Elaine to solidify her contract.

Delroy a recently shot love scene between Keefe and Elaine, willingly pointing out a spousicide-related detail which compromises the already delicate position of the young widower.

It continues Cohen's interrogation and extension of motifs contained within the films of Alfred Hitchcock, but they are here mediated within the mode of the former's cherished 'guerrilla cinema'.

[7] 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.

"[4] In Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker, scholar Tony Williams notes that the film "never got proper theatrical distribution and went straight to video.

To judge by the lines delivered by the murderous director, Mr. Cohen apparently thought he was issuing a statement about reality and imagination.