Horror Movie
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Slasher movies are seen by some as kitschy fun, but this is a seriously disturbing novel, delving into the sacrifices art demands, psychological trauma and how monsters are made. Sometimes painful reading, it's also incredibly gripping, smart and scary." The Guardian
The New York Times bestseller! Includes bonus content - see concept notes and pages from Tremblay's notebooks.
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.
The weird part? Only three of the film's scenes were ever released to the public. Steeped in mystery and tragedy, the film has taken on a mythic renown.
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tremblay (The Beast You Are) raises the bar for the cursed film trope with a novel that cleverly breaks the fourth wall between imaginary horrors and their real-world repercussions. The unnamed narrator is the sole surviving crew member of the eponymous film, a low-budget monster movie whose production began in 1993 but was never completed for dramatic reasons revealed over the course of the narrative. Thirty years later, a bigger crew with a bigger budget hopes to reboot the film and capitalize on its reputation with horror fans as a legendary might-have-been masterpiece, most of whose creators died tragically young. They also want the narrator to reprise his role as "the Thin Kid," a masked victim who turns monstrous under the cruel torments of his teen classmates. Tremblay hopscotches back and forth between two converging plot threads, one set during the movie's original filming and the other in present-day Los Angeles, and splices in portions of the original screenplay, the better to highlight the narrator's increasingly unsettling identification with his creepy Thin Kid character. A shocking but perfectly planned twist at the story's climax makes this one of the most exciting outings in the recent crop of fiction about horror movies. Readers won't want to miss out.
