#BookReview ‘Horror Movie’ by Paul Tremblay

About the book…

The monster at the heart of a cult 90s cursed horror film tells his shocking and bloody secret history. Slow burn terror meets high-stakes showdowns, from the bestselling author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World.

Summer, 1993 – a group of young guerrilla filmmakers spend four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror film. Steeped in mystery and tragedy, the film has taken on a mythic, cult renown, despite only three of the original scenes ever being released to the public.

Decades later, a big budget reboot is in the works, and Hollywood turns to the only surviving cast member – the man who played ‘the Thin Kid’, the masked teen at the centre of it all. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the crossed lines on set.

Caught in a nightmare of masks and appearances, facile Hollywood personalities and the strangeness of fan conventions, the Thin Kid spins a tale of past and present, scripts and reality, and what the camera lets us see. But at what cost do we revisit our demons?

Titan Books published ‘Horror Movie’ on 1st July in hardcover and e-book formats, my grateful thanks to the lovely people at Titan for my gifted review copy!

Well, what do you say?

It’s a Jack In A Box of a novel in reverse-it starts with the Thin Kid revealed…and as his narrative proceeds, he pulls you down into the darkness and locks the lid.

His story bounces back and forth between the now, when a reboot is being considered/filmed, and then, when he was originally approached to star as the eponymous character in a film made by his fellow students.

Question-can a film be said to be being rebooted, if it was never made in the first place?

Teasing glimpses are given at the screenplay, as released by one of the creators, providing a somewhat third narrative strand which along with the Thin Kid’s recollections, creates such a sense of illusion in the mind of this reader that I would have sworn blind that ‘Horror Movie’ existed. And yet…it does not. Hinted at tragedies made the finished product unshowable, but thanks to fandoms and the internet, it has acquired a mythic quality which has led to the remake being raised.

So there is a film which was never released, a myth surrounding it where very few people were actually involved, a storyline around a kid both with, and without, a name, and the nature of fandoms explored from the perspective of those who were there.

It creates a heady mix of expectation and metatextuality which is immensely appealing to this reader as reality bends and shifts, the meaning of the film-disenfranchised youths create chaos for the sake of their art, or do they?-and the tragic real world consequences of envisaging a mystery which is maybe better off not solved.

This book is terrifying because you are mired in the psychological process of the Thin Kid, and his creation both as a person and a social phenomena. Whilst we readers peel back the layers of who, or what, the Thin Kid is, we become gradually immersed in the need to know just what happened during the movie’s inception. The social contagion we sneer at becomes a need to knwo , a need to see, as we become the audience for a visual feast which exists as surely in our heads as it never, ever did on the screen.

The power of the imagination sparked by what is a deceptively simple premise is what sucks you in. The quality of the prose and characterisation which epitomises Tremblay’s work is what keeps you turning the pages.

If you haven’t read a novel by him before, this is a perfect leaping on point, and also stay behind because we really need to have words about why you have not read one of the best writers working in horror today.

About the author…

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the author of ‘The Pallbearer’s Club’ (2022), ‘Survivor Song’ (2020), ‘The Cabin At The End Of The World’ (2018), ‘Disappearance At Devil’s Rock’,(2016) , ‘A Head Full Of Ghosts’(2016)and the crime novels ‘The Little Sleep and No Sleep Until Wonderland’(2021)

His essays and short fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly online, and numerous year’s-best anthologies. He has a master’s degree in mathematics and lives outside Boston with his family.

Links-http://www.paultremblay.net/

Twitter @paulGtremblay @TitanBooks