Book Review: Horror Movie: a Novel by Paul Tremblay

 

Horror Movie by Paul Trembly

288 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 11, 2024 by William Morrow

 

   As I write this book review, we are one day away from the start of the 2024 Stokercon and Paul is a Guest of Honor. Our San Diego Chapter is hosting the international gathering of the Horror Writers Association.  So, this is a fun time to read this book, but a shit time to write this review might be a little short. I am super busy right now. I ended up with an arc for this novel because Anika of Verbatim Books, my neighborhood used bookstore, lent it to me, afraid she might miss him at the mass signing. Either way, I was excited to check it out. (As a side note the book is not out yet and has 500 reviews, I don’t have 1/10th of that on some of my novels out for years- I find this mind-boggling.)

Paul Tremblay’s last book Pallbearers Club, really worked for me. I had a feeling the way he was experimenting with the narrative that it wouldn’t be the easy slam dunk that Cabin at the End of The World was. That book was also helped recently by the Hollywood treatment that like the Will Smith I Am Legend was ⅔ a good movie. As in when it followed the novel it was good.

This is an interesting time for Tremblay to comment directly on Horror movies. Fresh off a mixed bag of an experience seeing the concept for his novel brought to life (with a radically different ending in M.Night’s Knock at the Cabin) he is in a spot to be skeptical of the whole horror movie engine.  Stephen Graham Jones has been the king of commenting on horror movies as a story engine.  His novels often reflect horror novels and his characters never ignore the idea that they know what is happening because they have seen as many movies as Stephen.

This is a different animal, more of an entry in the cursed film subgenre for which Gemma Files Experimental Film is considered the gold standard. (It is on my TBR and has been forever I need to fix that). This novel plays with reality and the classic unreliable narrator. I am not sure we ever even learn the lead point of view character’s name. We certainly can’t trust what we are being told.

One of the reasons I liked Pallbearers Club is that Tremblay was experimenting with how the narrative unfolded, playing with form and point of view throughout. Horror Movie is equally as daring even as the prose is much simpler. There are time jumps, and shifting points of view but it is mostly the Thin Kid’s POV and intercut with the “actual” screenplay of the cursed film.

He was not an actor but was recruited by his friends Valentina and Cleo to play the role of The Thin Kid, the abused victim and masked figure that becomes the spirit of vengeance. They never finished the movie, but an accident that burned him and took part of his pinky made the film a legend. Three scenes released on YouTube by Cleo before her death were enough to get Hollywood interested.

The actor who played the Thin Kid is the last person alive so it adds to the mythology and makes him important to the production. Tremblay comments on Hollywood, fan conventions, and no-budget filmmaking, while crafting a creepy story.  What is a legend, what is bullshit and what is the tragedy of a well-intentioned group of filmmakers becomes a web holding the novel together.

Tremblay does such a good job taking tropes like home invasion, pandemic, and now cursed films and making them his own. Sure Head Full of Ghosts is a possession novel, but Tremblay has become who he is in part because he makes the well-used tropes his own. The best part of the novel was in the screenplay portions when the script talks about how the audience would react to watching the movie. Something only a few screenwriters have tried. There is a moment when the movie seems to stop and the screenplay talks to the viewer. Having already suggested how the audience in the theater would react the script talks the viewers of the film, the ones at home.

“Some of us at home, either alone or ignoring the conversation around us, stare hard at the screen and we concentrate, and we think we can see subtle changes, shadows growing or shrinking, changing contour, and some of us are about to shout out, “I see it!” But we blink and the image resets and nothing has changed.”

   Horror Movie as a novel dives into how horror can and does become an obsession. The psychological ripples of this story are vivid as the narrative is disruptive. Paul Tremblay and Josh Malerman continue to be two of the most consistent horror author of the writers who started past the horror boom.