Horror Movie: A “cursed film” and a cursed narrator

Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

2024’s Horror Movie is the first Paul Tremblay book I’ve read. Having finished this disturbing, baffling and freaky tour de force, I will now seek out his other works.

Haunted films or cursed films are nothing new in the horror subgenre or even in pop-culture folklore. Tremblay takes this time-honored trope and runs with it. The book makes its way through three storylines; a present tense storyline narrated by our first-person narrator; his recollections on that time in 1993 when he was part of an independent film called Horror Movie (that was never completed); and the screenplay to Horror Movie itself. I don’t think we ever know the name of our narrator, but he played the Thin Kid in the movie, and now, thirty years later, that’s how he identifies himself.

The Thin Kid is the sole survivor of the tiny cast and crew who tried to make their indie film in 1993. Years after the project shut down, three filmed scenes from the movie showed up on YouTube, and later the screenplay mysteriously appeared on the internet. Hollywood has approached the project several times since then, but in this most recent round , the Thin Kid is approached to have a role in some capacity—possibly a producer credit. Since the Thin Kid has tried desperately to make a career out of his brief stint in the cult project, he accepts the deal. And it looks like this time, it might really happen.

The Thin Kid remembers how he got involved in the original project, and when he first met Valentina, the producer/director/actor, and Cleo, the screenwriter/actor (since the budget is thinner than a shoestring). He describes for us the role of the abandoned school they got permission to shoot in, and the many discussions with Valentina and Cleo. Cleo, and her character, share a strange attitude toward life and death. Her style of screenwriting is idiosyncratic, and she doesn’t follow the accepted template. As we get deeper into the story, pages from the screenplay appear—and it’s clear there is a lot of editorializing along with stage direction and dialogue. And the story, from the first scene filmed, slithered into my brain and took up residence.

That creepiness seeps into the present tense of the story. In the screenplay, the character called the Thin Kid, whose face the audience never really sees, is forced to wear a strange crocodile-like reptilian mask. So how weird is it that thirty years later, Thin Kid still has the original mask? The deeper in we go, the more disturbing the film becomes, the more questions we have. Can we trust Thin Kid’s memories of the original shoot? There is literally no one else alive who can corroborate his version of events. Most of the deaths were of natural causes or accidental, but they add to the sense that the project is cursed. Someone in this movie wants to create a monster—and they’re succeeding.

Paul Tremblay

Tremblay layers in the weird at every point in this work. When the make up and prosthetic people start making a life mask for Thin Kid for the remake, their plaster mold comes out with some strange results. In the meantime, as Thin Kid reminisces about the original shoot, we readers start to see how truly strange and dangerous that set was. Did he really lose the tip of a finger filming a scene? And then there’s the screenplay, where the screenwriter veers away from the story on the pages to share insights with… the audience? The reader? Herself? Those insights grow more frightening.

Tremblay’s expertise with the forms meant that, whether I liked it or not, the scenes rolled out as if I were watching the film. The sense of dread starts with the first scene we read, and never ebbs. I watched the monster character grow, until a climactic scene two-thirds of the way through the book, where, after the monster attacks a teen party, shredding the partygoers, it pursues its creators. The tension tightens and tightens, as one character is trapped in a maze-like house, with the monster about to spring out. The scene…lingers on a shot of the doorway, and leaves. Us. Hanging.

As we wait, the screenplay shifts into a contemplation of the movie-going experience, while including a “ticking clock.” (“We’ve been waiting for the Thin Kid to appear for twenty seconds now.”) The screenplay-monologue is long, and as I read it, I was twitching. Where’s the monster? I realized that I, the reader, was experiencing exactly what the theoretical moviegoers would be experiencing–grinding, tearing suspense. And only then did I start to wonder whether the screenplay that found its way onto the internet was truly the “original” script, if in fact I could trust anything the Thin Kid told us.

Strangely, the one on-set death, which is terrible, didn’t disturb me as much as anything else. The actual death is a relief, the shock a momentary break in the crawling dread.

The weirdness of the screenplay storyline, the powerful, insidious imagery, stayed with me after I finished the book. For me, whether I like that experience or not, that’s the sign of a successful horror story. Questions remain: Can anything the Thin Kid told us be trusted? Why would anyone even imagine creating a monster on purpose? What is it about the determined, unexplained evil of the movie’s storyline that captivates us? These questions are also the signs of a good horror story. Deeply psychologically unsettling, Horror Movie is a great horror read.