Horror Movie - Paul Tremblay
- Publisher – Titan Books
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £19.99 hardback | £7.47 Kindle **
I'm a sucker for horror that focuses on films and the film-making process. Films like Censor and Berberian Sound Studio are among my favourites, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Silver Nitrate is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I've been meaning to read some Tremblay for a long time, so when I heard about Horror Movie I thought this would be a good place to start. Here's the synopis:
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 twist on the "cursed film" that breathlessly builds to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.
This was fine - good, even - but ultimately a little disappointing.
The conceit is that the man who played "The Thin Kid" in a legendary cursed film in the 90s has just finished shooting the remake, and he's also recording an audiobook about his experiences during the making of both films. We're reading a transcript of the audiobook, which also contains the full screenplay of the original film. The narrative jumps back and forth between the present day, the early 90s, and the screenplay, and we slowly learn what happened during the shoot that made the original film so legendary.
Early on, Cleo - the author of the screenplay - states that her script is a little unconventional, and that that's intentional. And the script is unconventional, in that it contains huge descriptive passages and tells us about the thoughts, feeling, and backstory of its characters - things that would never end up on screen. I understand why Tremblay took this approach, but for me it didn't quite land because I never felt like I was reading an actual script.
The main character (whose name we never learn) is also deeply unlikable. He possesses an air of unearned superiority, and he reads like a specific kind of man I often encounter on Twitter or at conventions - an aging Gen X dude who's intentionally, aggressively edgy and obnoxious, cynical and disaffected, who really wants you to know how much he doesn't care about anything. He always feels like he's a few seconds away from telling you how in childhood he was kicked out of his house every day at dawn and didn't come back until nightfall, surviving on water from garden hoses.
There are definitely things to like in here. I enjoyed the sections dealing with the making of the original film a lot, and I wish that there had been more of them. The climax of that section is very impactful and personally I think works much better than the climax of the novel as a whole, which suffers from the same problem as a lot of the low-budget indie horror the book is in conversation with - namely that it feels like there's a big, violent ending that isn't really earned because the story didn't have anywhere else left to go. The ending also ramps up a supernatural element that's only previously been hinted at in the most oblique of ways, and that I wish had either been developed more thoroughly in the earlier parts of the novel or else had been cut entirely in favour of a more grounded, personal horror.
As I said up top, this is fine. There's certainly nothing bad about it, it just didn't really excite me in the way I hoped it would.
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