REVIEW: Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

 

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? 

After all these years, the monster the world never saw will finally be heard.

"I'm afraid of thinking like her, or I'm afraid of thinking like her all the time. I could be wrong, but I think all of us at some point in our lives, especially when we're teenagers, feel like we want to die, and yet, at the same time, we're terrified of it. That's - that's part of the human condition, right?"

A dark, cinematic story of human depravity and weakness ripped right from the silver screen - all the gritty fear and intensify of a b-movie with the drama and feverish pitch of a blockbuster and the subtle, quiet horror of a bohemian arthouse picture.

Jumping between the meeting producers, the original cast, hearing people trying to act like they know about the original cult film and the messed up things happening while filming - during the retelling and the original, it gets a little confusing but eventually settles in to a flow, our narrator being a complicated fellow but undeniably compelling. He’s blunt, bitter and a bit rude, his storytelling like a simple one-sided conversation fuelled with cynicism and frustration interspersed by script snippets or complete moments of emotional flux and terror.

Every little detail was placed to induce a sense of doom even when nothing bad happened, it moved slowly, nothing really occurring but the setting felt haunted and unsettling until it takes a bloody, twisted turn. Living between the movie script and real life creates a confusing, murky reality where they start to blur into each other, our narrator and his character becoming the same person. It was an entirely fucked up book, and it was maddeningly delightful.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

• I was gifted an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review. 
• Please check content warnings before reading as this book contains subjects including suicide, violence, and murder.