Near the end of class on Tuesday most everyone started to talk about TV shows and breaking the fourth wall, the fourth wall being the invisible barrier that separates the show/text from the audience. Breakage of the fourth wall has been used fairly extensively, albeit it only recently became a more popular technique in the 20th century.
The first notable usage of breaking the fourth wall would probably be the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series (and all books related to it, like the goosebumps books.) These books used the choices of the reader to impact the how the story played out- at the end of teach page there would be instructions to turn to different pages based on the reader's choices (that or the story would end.) In this example, the purpose of breaking the fourth wall seems to be to add a further layer of immersion to the story, allowing the reader to LITERALLY control the outcome of the story.
Another example would be for comedic value. For example, we saw a segment of the last episode of Family Guy's previous season where Stewie stopped to comment on the non-diegetic 24 ad taking up the screen in the middle of the episode, followed by explaining to Lois that it was just a joke. In this instance of the show, the two characters went "out of character" to acknowledge something going on around them, this would be like if in a play an actor talked directly to a member of the audience instead of the fellow cast-members on-stage during a production. Here, the purpose is clearly comedic.
Probably the only other example is for commercial purposes. Obviously, this is limited to... well, commercials. Everyone knows the structure of commercials and what they are used for- they grab your attention, explain a product, and end with a "Buy Now!" schpeale. Here the actors and pitchmen are literally talking to the audience and explaining their product, there isn't a plot or anything in commercials.
I personally would be very interested in seeing a fourth wall breakage beyond these three usages (immersion, comedy and commercial usage.) If a director could break the fourth wall in a horror-themed movie (and if it fit in well,) I would be very impressed. It just seems like these are the only "appropriate" ways to break the fourth wall, all others would be highly out of place.
Fourth walls in horror
Actually, there are some excellent uses of metalepsis in horror film and "psychological thrillers." You can probably think of sci fi texts with a "what you thought was the fake world is actually the real world" plot, for example, and I think that usually counts as metalepsis.
One of my favorites, by the way, is in the videogame Eternal Darkness (for Gamecube and highly recommended).
Anyway, I think you're misunderstanding part of the concept. Commercials are all about directly addressing the viewer. There's no fourth wall to break, because the narrative scenario already includes us as the direct object of the characters' gaze. That's the whole premise.
A metalepsis occurs (and remember, fourth-wall-breaking is just one kind of metalepsis) when an established diegetic boundary gets crossed in some unexpected way, like in the example by Unknownspirit where a group of characters attack the narrator.
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