BOOK REVIEW | HORROR MOVIE | PAUL TREMBLAY

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

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

As an author, Paul Tremblay challenges me as a reader and he does that rare thing for me. He elicits emotions that make me feel uncomfortable. It’s not that I don’t get emotions when I read books, I do! It’s just that I get all the right emotions in the right places. With Paul Tremblay books my emotions are all over the place and I regularly find myself utterly confounded.

In Horror Movie, Tremblay tells the story of a horror film that never got made but through the release of a few scenes and the script, the film has garnered a state of almost fanatical notoriety.

Told from the point of view of the only remaining survivor of the film, the Eponymous Thin Kid, Tremblay tells the story of the original film, its aftermath and the present fervour to reboot the original film (even though it was never actually made).

Using different mediums, such as the original film script, an audiobook narration of the historical events as told by the Thin Kid and the current meetings that will hopefully see the film brought to the big screen , Tremblay tells the story of Horror Movie and the events that finally lead to tragedy (not a spoiler as this is on the blurb)

Throughout Horror Movie, Tremblay deconstructs the slasher trope with almost surgeon-like precision and much like Victor Frankenstein, builds something that whilst familiar, is almost entirely alien.

As I said. Tremblay instils in me mixed emotions when it comes to his book, I swing wildly between this is absolute genius to this is metaphysical bullshit, and everything in between. The book is a bit of a slow burn when it comes to the story, telling the story of the original film and how it was made, the processes the character endures to become the embodiment of the part that he is playing, it then swings between two different timelines to what happened in between the final timeline of what is happening now.

Throughout it all, you are never quite sure what is actually going on, everything is ambiguous, even the fact that we never know the name of the protagonist. Were the events of the past real? Or are they a phantasmagoria of memory and the imagined - I don’t know! I didn’t know when I was reading it, and I don’t know when I have let the book settle and be digested. However, this is the beauty of the book and how it grips you tightly around the throat and never lets you go. 

In between all this there are some ministrations on what makes a horror fan as Tremblay breaks the fourth wall to scrutinise how the horror aficionado consumes their medium of choice and what makes them tick, and as that lens is pointed at you the reader, it makes you feel slightly uncomfortable. 

In the end, I found myself staring at the page attempting to work out what the hell I had just read, and I am still not quite sure. It’s one of those books where I don’t actually know if I enjoyed it or not. However, what it did do was get me thinking and it elicited emotions, so make of that what you will!