By PAUL TREMBLAY (HarperCollins; 2024)
The field of horror movie themed horror novels is a crowded one in which HORROR MOVIE by Paul Tramblay ranks as mid. The novel is well written, certainly, even if its concept of a cursed film from a past era making its mark in the present is a mite hackneyed.
That past era was the early 1990s, and the film a no-budgeter called HORROR MOVIE, directed by an egomaniacal young woman named Valentina Rojas. The production was a fraught one that ended with a murder trial and the film being shelved, with only three clips released for public consumption. Yet a rabid cult has sprung up around HORROR MOVIE, and Hollywood has taken notice, seeking to reboot the film with its only surviving cast member, a now middle aged fellow who played the antagonist “The Thin Kid” and happens to be the book’s narrator.
This guy’s recollections of HORROR MOVIE’s filming, which (as is made clear early on) aren’t entirely reliable, are juxtaposed with his present day exploits—involving a character identified as “Producer Guy”—and excerpts from the film’s screenplay. The insertion of screenplay syntax into a prose narrative is a modern literary device I find especially annoying, but here it’s used in a clever manner, with the script pages, which are highly unorthodox (thus bringing up a slight believability problem: the script and film seem far too pretentious to inspire the type of rabid cult following among horror fans that HORROR MOVIE supposedly enjoys), parceled out in the same manner as the narrator’s memories: in piecemeal fashion, relaying the events of the film and the behind-the-scenes calamities that beset it on a strict need-to-know basis (and saving the really nasty bits for last).
The book’s presentation of the modern horror media scene, which includes a signing appearance the narrator makes at a horror convention, feels authentic (this claim, keep in mind, is from one who knows that scene quite well). Paul Tremblay has clearly done his homework, and deserves credit for that, in addition to turning out a consistently engaging book with a staunchly intellectual air. Tremblay’s aims evidently stretched far beyond the subject at hand, encompassing the nature of art and spectatorship, and which of those things can truly be dubbed the controlling agent.
Where Tremblay falls short is an area that afflicts many movie-themed horror novels (such as THE LATE GREAT CREATURE by Brock Brower and MIDNIGHT MOVIE by Tobe Hooper and Alan Goldsher): he’s neglected the horrific—or as the book’s Amazon.com description terms them, “psychologically chilling”—aspects. It’s as if Tremblay’s determination to show off his knowledge of the horror scene (as with Brower and Hooper-Goldsher) distracted him from his core mission.
Aside from the at-times macabre details of the HORROR MOVIE shoot and the possibility that the narrator (who as already noted doesn’t seem entirely reliable) may be taking his Thin Kid role a bit too seriously, there’s little in the way of scares, with even the cursed film gambit dropped long before the gruesome ending. Regarding that ending, it feels tacked-on, the likely result of a too-little too-late epiphany on the part of the author that maybe this horror novel needed more horror.