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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 twist on the “cursed film” that breathlessly builds to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion.

Review:

Paul Tremblay has been producing novels at a steady rate, releasing a new book almost every year. His latest Horror Movie is about a guy who was in a horror movie in college, a horror movie that was lost after an accident on the set, a horror movie that has become an obsession with horror fans and convention goers, a horror movie that is getting remade using as much of the screenplay as possible. Half of this novel is the narrator, who played “The Thin Boy”, as the only survivor left, living the best he can while getting calls to appear at conventions, and meet with producers and directors to make the new version of Horror Movie. The other half is the script to the original Horror Movie. As the novel progresses, the story starts to blend, and we learn what happened to make the original Horror Movie film be considered lost film, how fans think it is cursed, and what really happened to make everyone think this way.

The story is entertaining, the characters are interesting, and I really like the mechanics of the story, which is really about the mechanics of filmmaking. There is the whole mystic behind the “magic of moviemaking” because most of the time, watching a good movie then watching how difficult it was to film is the equivalent to learning how sausage is made. Unfortunately we do not want to believe that many movies are a nightmare to film. We want to think that making films is a wonderful process without difficulty, but the truth is that this rarely ever happens. In the case of Horror Movie, the original movie is shot with several problems, and it is no surprise that only pieces of the movie that even exist are a few clips uploaded to YouTube and a leaked script. Trembley tries to pulls us away from being readers of a novel to being fans of a lost film that we too hope is successful on the second filming. 

Horror Movie is a good novel but it kind of feels like the end is actually the beginning. When the final pages are over, this is a good place to really start the novel, that there is so much more now that could happen. This is not the feeling of “I want more” as much as the feeling that this story is incomplete, that the entire novel is the origin story of “The Thin Boy” and not the whole story at all. As it stands, the way that this novel ends undermines all of the buildup and weakens the entire story. The ending really lowered the experience of the story, and this is unfortunate because I did like the journey.