SYNOPSIS
A chilling twist on the “cursed film” genre from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club and The Cabin at the End of the World.
In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror flick.
The weird part? Only three of the film’s scenes were ever released to the public, but Horror Movie has nevertheless grown a rabid fanbase. Three decades later, Hollywood is pushing for a big budget reboot.
The man who played “The Thin Kid” is the only surviving cast member. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the dangerous crossed lines on set that resulted in tragedy. As memories flood back in, the boundaries between reality and film, past and present start to blur. But he’s going to help remake the film, even if it means navigating a world of cynical producers, egomaniacal directors, and surreal fan conventions—demons of the past be damned.
But at what cost?
Horror Movie is an obsessive, psychologically chilling, and suspenseful feat of storytelling genius that builds inexorably to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.
REVIEW
A HUGE thank you to Harper Collins and William Morrow Book for sending me an advanced reading copy. The opinions in this review are honest and my own.
Part 4’s are hard. Just ask Scream or Halloween. But here I am, just a kid trying to live up to the previous 3 amazing reviews from my fellow reviewers here of FearForAll. Well, here it goes.
Horror Movie is the first Paul Tremblay novel I’ve read and it most certainly will not be my last. I can’t yet say it’s his best work, but I can say there’s a really good chance it’ll be my favorite novel of the year.
As a child of Scream, I was destined to love this book. As someone who has been disappointed by the new era of Scream, this book was just what I needed. This is the modern meta horror tale we didn’t get. But it doesn’t just comment on the state of horror films and fandom, it also comments on our obsession with doomed productions.
Cursed FIlms is an excellent documentary series on Shudder. In it, they break down popular films associated with “curses” due to the tragedies that surround them. But what I love about that show is they always bring it back to reality. These films weren’t cursed. These things happen because of studios or filmmakers taking shortcuts or tragic twists of fate. Applying a “curse” to them can be disrespectful and irresponsible. We often forget these are real people and these things have lasting impacts on many lives. With The Crow being one of the most popular “cursed films” and the fact that it has a remake right around the corner makes this novel extremely timely.
This story revolves around the only surviving cast member of a film that never got finished due to a mysterious tragedy. A remake is in the works and he’s been contacted to make an appearance. We slowly learn what happened during the original fateful attempt to make Horror Movie, going back and forth from the past and the present, where the remake is being developed. The more we learn, the more we are led to believe something…not natural may have happened but we also don’t know how much we’re being told is to be believed. That’s the genius of this novel.
Told in first person by The Thin Kid, our view of what happened is limited. We’re also dealing with someone who’s been hounded by whatever happened during the original production. So is everything he tells us real? Or is he building on the mythology to, for lack of better words, fuck with us?
If you take this story for what we’re given on the surface, it’s absolutely terrifying. But if you go deeper, it’s equally chilling but for vastly different reasons. In that light, we’re seeing the breakdown of someone who thought they were just making a film where something terrible happened. A person whose entire existence has been defined by one moment that only he can explain, but the public has made up their own answers. It’s a deep examination of what happens when the court of public opinion has become so ubiquitous with the truth, even the parties involved get confused. Or perhaps just fed up.
Even without the subtext, Horror Movie is a terrifying novel. Full of unsettling imagery, a creeping sense of dread permeates every page. Like driving past a car crash, we can’t help but rubberneck as an inevitable tragedy unfolds before us.
Horror Movie is a deep examination of our obsession with tragedy. It asks a question brought up in Scream, do movies influence people to become monsters or was it there the whole time? It makes us think twice when we want to perpetuate the idea of curses and asks us to look at the real people involved. It’s a deep, long look in the mirror to examine who the real monsters are. The actors portraying them? The director who took too many shortcuts? Fate? Or is it us, the audience, who projects these ideas on to real tragedies to make them easier to understand? Because sometimes the truth is much simpler and awful. Sometimes, shit just happens. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Horror Movie does all of this, while also being a scary as fuck story. You don’t need to read into the subtext to get a good scare and enjoy this novel. But it’s there, and it’s poignant.
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