Horror Movie
A Novel
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3.4 • 170 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Instant New York Times bestseller!
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 feat of storytelling genius that builds inexorably to an unforgettable, mind-bending conclusion
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Demonic forces are nothing compared to the horror of trauma and regret in this brilliant take on one of our favorite horror tropes, the cursed film. It’s been 30 years since the unreleased indie slasher film aptly titled Horror Movie became an object of cult obsession. Now that Hollywood wants to remake it, our unnamed narrator—the only surviving member of the original cast (hmm...)—finds himself wading back into his horrifying and long-repressed memories of the production. The novel’s structure splits the narrative into three parts, taking us into the filming of the original movie, the production of the modern reboot, and selections from the screenplay itself. What’s revealed in each is deeply disturbing, not just because of the events that unfold but because of how it feels to be trapped in the narrator’s haunted, increasingly broken mind. Reading this cinematic horror tale is a uniquely unnerving experience.
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.
Customer Reviews
Strong setup, unfulfilling denouement
I blazed through this book in a couple of days - a testament to how propulsive it is…
To an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion.
It very cleverly alternates between the story surrounding the filmmaking of both the original, and now the remake (or reboot?, as the book likes to play with the right name for it), and the actual script..
And it does a great job of getting you to look forward to, ultimately, three separate payoffs… what actually happens in Cleo’s script, what happened to the people who made it, and then what happens now…
Of those three, two fall flat. What happens to the people involved, that works and feels “right”, but the rest just feels rushed.
The actual end of the script is all wrong, and should’ve substituted two characters for its finale… and the real-world, modern-day finale feels very… “movie”, as one character describes something earlier.
But, like that character, you’re to expect more than that…
Horror Movie
Long read for very little
I was shocked at every turn
This book got to me mentally, which I love. The characters are real, the horror is complicated. Its genius is unmistakable. I highly recommend it as a horror movie that I read and thoroughly enjoyed!