A review by thereadingrambler
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

4.0

This book relies on an impending sense of doom and a perpetual sense of dread—and it does it so well. I could barely put this book down but I also constantly wanted to run away from it. It fascinated me in the kind of way where I felt I need to peek through my fingers. I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there.

The book follows an unnamed man through two timelines intercut with excerpts from a screenplay. We also have an implied frame story of the unnamed main character narrating the book we are currently reading (aside: I read this book, but I do wonder if there would be an added element if you listened to the audiobook). He move between the past and the present. In the past he is filming Horror Movie, while in the present he is being courted to get Horror Movie rebooted because of its massive online cult following. The odd thing about this cult following is that Horror Movie was never released or even finished. The fanbase arose around three scenes, three stills, and the script—and the fact all of the major members of the cast and crew are dead except for our narrator.

As we move through the book we slowly realize that there is something truly terrible currently going on and something terrible that happened on the set of the original Horror Movie. What Tremblay does so exceedingly well is entwining the script, the past, and the present into this horrifying conclusion that simultaneously seems inevitable and entirely preventable.

I loved the meta commentary on horror as a genre and the way horror fans interact with the genre and the people who make the genre. There’s a pivotal scene where the main character is at a horror fan convention and an antagonistic attendee demands that the main character reveal evidence of a trauma that informed how he played his role. The main character puts this kid in his place in a very satisfying way, but this interaction frames how the readers are supposed to understand the main character’s choices in the second half of the book and also how the reader is supposed to understand themselves in relation to the book.

The reader is so implicated in this book and is slowly drawn deeper and deeper in to the horror we and all of the characters are experiencing. It is really a beautiful exploration of the concept of horror itself.