Horror Movie, by Paul Tremblay

Summer, 1993 – a group of young guerrilla filmmakers spend four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror film. Steeped in mystery and tragedy, the film has taken on a mythic, cult renown, despite only three of the original scenes ever being released to the public.

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 the strangeness of 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.

I love the recent trend of ‘found footage’ books. Yes, they were once called Epistolary Novels, but we don’t have letters so much these days, do we? So here it’s a narrative that alternates chapters with a movie script that never was. Writers play with words to create effect after all, right?

If you’ve been anywhere near the horror bookshelves in recent years, you’ll know Paul Tremblay. Not just a lovely person, but a talented writer who genuinely knows how to spin a good yarn while ramping up the tension, so that we (the Constant Readers, you might say) just can’t stop reading his work.

Here we have a narrator without a name. In the titular movie, he was just ‘The Thin Kid’, and now he’s finally telling the truth about the novel’s own creepypasta film experience.

Yes, it’s a love-letter to pretentious film students and the vagaries of young-adult life. Absolutely, it riffs off the slasher phenomenon and just what makes horror tropes work. But like the original Blair Witch Project, we have a tiny crew making bad choices that seemed good at the time (so the Constant Reader can shout Stop, No, Don’t Go Down that Path), until we somehow find ourselves deep in the metaphorical woods without a map. And the monster is there with us.

This book is absolutely a rollercoaster. There’s one entire scene which is the pause… right… at the top… because you know the drop is coming… and it’s the sound of a writer at the absolute peak of his power. Poor Constant Reader hasn’t got a chance.

I read this in two sittings only because I had dogs to walk, and the vibe of the book was with me every step of that everyday errand. I revelled in this ride and am already looking forward to going again. If you love horror, you know you need to pick this up.