Horror Movie is a novel about a cursed film production, as the only remaining major cast or crew member gets involved with a big budget reboot. In 1993, a group of filmmakers made Horror Movie, but what happened on set meant that the film was never completed, and only three scenes (and the screenplay) were leaked online. In the present day, the only surviving cast member, the guy playing the infamous masked ‘Thin Kid’, is now a famous figure, as fans try and work out what really happened, and he’s involved in the reboot of the film, whilst also now narrating this story he’s telling about the present and the past of making both versions of the film.
Lots of horror these days plays with ideas of internet obsession and fandom, and in this case, Paul Tremblay takes the lost media and cursed production ideas to create a novel that is part screenplay, part unreliable narrator tells all. Despite being about a film that is pitched as a slasher, this isn’t a novel about jump scares and desperate running from the bad guy. Instead, you get the script, with its weird horror movie moments, and the narration, which is more about setting up ideas of what horror actually happened, and leaving you question it all even after the book ends. People looking for horror that is scary might be disappointed, as this one is quite a slow burn, with some vague body horror elements, but really exploring the horror of what you do and don’t see, and do and don’t believe.
I liked the whole mask thing, which reminded me of the Goosebumps book The Haunted Mask which I found very scary as a child, and the messy way that the unreliable narration left you unsure what the characters actually did or were even like. The purposeful distance through this, with the narrator having been purposefully distanced during original filming, means that you don’t really get much of any character, not even the narrator really, and the most coherent narrative is the script you’re reading, and even that narrative is questioned in the novel in various ways, through different shooting ideas or queries about if that version of the script is the original one. The book forces you to be the kind of voyeur that the narrator hates, the internet fan trying to piece together what happened, and also the voyeur that the script creates through the three other teens who aren’t the Thin Kid.
I don’t know how much Horror Movie will stand out from other examples of cursed film production fiction, but its focus on what we get to see and what perspective the viewer/reader gets makes it a very interesting book, if not a scary one. I found it fun to read and easy to get through in a single sitting, and I like the mythology around it, with the mask and the crocodile poem. I think the endings of both timelines leave a lot of interesting ambiguities, but I also think there’s other things that could’ve been delved into further (for example, one thread of the book is the unsafe set practices and ways in which the narrator became the character, and the dynamic of having two female characters in charge of this whilst the narrator is male and asked to diet, wear just underwear, etc is something that isn’t really explored, despite being a flip of a lot of traditional Hollywood dangerous/bad set myths).
Fiendfully Reading 
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