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.
Dark bleatings, my wonderful tribe! I’m here today to bleat on about Paul Tremblay’s most recent novel, Horror Movie, and I have to tell you upfront – I loved it.
I’m a huge fan when an author uses an unconventional narrative structure, and this book certainly falls into that category because the prose is interspliced with script scenes (plus, the script itself is also a bit unconventional, which worked because it was fun, and also because it avoided narrative issues like missing information that would need to be fed in elsewhere).
Additionally, we’re operating in two timelines – past and present. I love this – it’s possibly my favourite structural storytelling technique. The past is mostly in the script sections, which take us on the journey of this fabled horror movie being made, and tells us all about our protagonist and also the side characters and why this film is so interesting to people. The present deals with the fact that this unreleased film is now being remade, and the protagonist’s response to this. The sections interweave deliciously, each of them unfolding weird details and mysteries and questions, tying together like loose threads into an outstandingly satisfying knot at the end.
So, the story itself. Well, I loved it. This book melds everything I love; horror, horror movies, and oh look, it’s all in a novel. Also, it’s the type of horror that really has me singing its praises. You might think from the synopsis that you’re going to get a haunted movie set, or someone in the cast going totally unhinged or something, but it’s not any of that – it’s just utterly creepy. There’s something fucky, but it’s built up in such an eerie way that it took me a while to identify why I felt so spooked. Something is amiss…but why? How? Is it even amiss, or am I paranoid?
Lesser writers would go nuts with a concept like this, they’d go too big. What I find really impressive is Tremblay’s restraint. I felt like I should have seen the ending coming but I didn’t predict it because I was fully immersed in just enjoying the story, rather than actively trying to work it out where it was going.
And on that topic, I love Tremblay’s endings. He always seems to show restraint with how he rounds things off too – and not in a “oh, that was a bit lacklustre” way, but in a “thank the Dark Lord he didn’t go batshit, and instead stayed classy but still scary with it” kind of way. I know some people won’t agree, but for me, he ALWAYS sticks the landing. A Head Full of Ghosts ended in a way that elevated the novel from great to awesome. The Cabin at the End of the World is perfect because what is going on in the broader sense isn’t even the point, it’s a metaphor for what’s going on in the lives of the characters. The ambiguity is actually a perfect representation of life in the immediate wake of what happens. And he did it here too – it’s gloriously dark, beautifully set up, and then when you put the book down you’re like “hold on a second…” because there’s more to think about.
I think this is one of his most interesting works to date, and it’s refreshingly different. It just had me creeped out for the whole time I sat with it. I’m still creeped out now a couple of months later.
If you’d like to check out the book or the (simply wonderful) author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Happy Goat Horror 
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