Synopsis
A woman haunted by the disappearance of her sister and best friend thirty years ago uncovers the terrifying urban legend behind the last film they watched together, in this chilling riff on the cursed film subgenre by the Bram Stoker award-winning author of Queen of Teeth.
Perfect for fans of Gretchen Felker-Martin and Andrew Joseph White.
In November 1994, three girls visit their local movie theater to see an obscure film. Only one of them is ever seen again.
Thirty years later, Val McQueen has never forgotten the day she lost her little sister and best friend, but she’s closed the curtain on it, certain she’s moved on despite her parents’ resentment and hounding by true crime enthusiasts.
That is until a stranger’s murder brings it all screaming back—a terror she’s tried to tell herself is only a movie. Enlisting the help of cinephile and former classmate Roxie de la Fontaine to find the film, Val soon realizes that hers is not the only pursuit. Someone, or something involved with the movie is on the hunt, too…
… For the girl who got away all those years ago.
Review
Martin Scorsese once said movies are life. They can open hearts and minds, and take us to other places. In Hailey Piper’s This Movie Doesn’t End The Way We Want, movies – or, at least, one certain shlocky B-movie – are death. They’ll devour us whole if given the chance and leave nothing behind. For Val McQueen, one particular movie is a traumatic reminder of when she lost her sister and best friend, along with parts of her own self and, eventually, her family.
In 1994, teenage Val, her sister Ash, and best friend Colette are enjoying a girls night out at the movies. Val’s eye is immediately caught by the poster advertising a one-night only screening of Blood-Curse of the Toad Man, and since it’s her turn to pick, Colette’s demands to check out Interview with the Vampire fall by the wayside. As the movie progresses, off-screen oddities being to pile up. A strange, swampy smell befouls the screening room, and a large, lip-smacking figure in a trench coat and large hat sits behind them, progressively moving closer and closer despite never actually seeming to get up to change seats. Panic grips Val and she runs to the bathroom near the film’s climax, only to return and discover her companions are gone, along with the shadowy figure that had been lurking behind them. Thirty years later, the movie has returned, and it’s once again begun claiming those close to Val.
Horror fans will no doubt already be familiar with the cursed film trope. Typically, it involves a movie or TV production being struck with a series of strange accidents or shocking deaths that otherwise make for a troubled production, like Brandon Lee’s death on the set of The Crow, or the demise of several actors involved in the Poltergeist series. Within the horror genre, it’s the type of premise that’s ripe for exploitation as a ghost story or slashers, or taken more literally as a form of cursed media as depicted in The Ring or Piper’s own A Game In Yellow.
Piper takes the general conceit of cursed media and breathes life into it in ways that feel fresh, original, and innovative. She tackles the material in several intriguing ways, taking the tried-and-true detective narrative and filtering it through her particular lens of sapphic cosmic horror fronted by messy, messed-up women. If you’ve read her outstanding A Game in Yellow or The Worm and His Kings series, then you know just how damn good, and even special, her work in this arena is. The way she approaches the cosmic angle here is next-level fantastic, not to mention just flat-out cool as hell.
After a freshly made acquaintance disappears under extraordinary, and all too familiar circumstances, Val hires Roxie, a detective of sorts that specializes in tracking down lost media, to find out whatever she can about this movie that has been haunting, and perhaps even hunting, Val for decades. Yet, for all intents and purposes, Blood-Curse of the Toad Man doesn’t exist beyond the hushed warnings and rumors, with only a few having ever heard of it. Reading about Roxie’s research or Val’s pursuit of a large, shadowy figure through an alley outside her tattoo parlor, you can all but see the Dutch angles of a desaturated, if not straight-up black and white, strikingly shadowed, neo-noir flick like the Coen Brothers’s Blood Simple or The Man Who Wasn’t There.
This Movie Doesn’t End The Way We Want is intensely cinematic – not just because of its subject matter, although that’s certainly key, but because of Piper’s writing style and influences. This is a book that’s as rich in mood and vibes as it is in mythmaking. It’s a cosmic horror book written by a lover of cinema for fellow cinema lovers. You can’t only pinpoint the influences of David Lynch’s surrealistic imagery or the destruction of one’s sanity and certainty in their understanding of the world, like in John Carpenter’s At The Mouth of Madness, you can feel them, strongly and intensely, in the escalating creeping dread of it all. Piper doesn’t just craft a horror lover’s ode to the movies — she carries it a huge step further in the ways she makes the concept of film otherworldly and larger than life, taking the darkness and flickering lights of your local cineplex and turning them into a playground for terror, destroying the lines between spectator and victim.
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