This is so amazingly, incredibly, wonderfully my wheelhouse.
Mixed media? Check. Book about movie making? Check. And it’s a horror film? Which was never finished and is rumoured to be cursed? Multiple time periods? Unreliable narrator? Check check check.
I read this over 3 days and only because I wanted to savour it when I was getting close to reading it in 2.
Our unnamed narrator is the star of a horror film with a tragic past which was never finished or release but has a cult following. We meet him at multiple points - in discussions about a reboot, in his early 20s as they make the film, at horror conventions, during the reboot.
The book is also interspersed with the actual screenplay of the film.

I absolutely loved this. From the recruitment of our narrator who has no acting experience but is picked purely for his build (“or lack of build”) to play The Thin Kid, to his experience on set, to becoming The Thin Kid, to his life post-movie and into the future of the reboot. Everything about this felt real.

I loved every minute of this. I wish there was more!

Everytime I read a Tremblay book I give it a mid rating and swear I won't read any more and yet here I am. And yet again, it's a mid rating.

The book was fine? I liked the format and the use of script to move the narrative along but I didn't find it particularly scary and I felt like a lot of the stuff that happened was predictable.

I'm just not getting the Tremblay hype which is a shame as I'm a big horror fan!

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC

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).

This was a much anticipated read for me, but unfortunately it didn't live up to expectations. I didn't feel connected to any of the characters, it was a slowburn and there was nothing nearly horrifying in it. I really enjoyed Tremblays "A Head Full of Ghosts" though, so I hope I'll enjoy another book of his more.

Thank you NetGalley / Titan books for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Horror Movie follows three strands: 1) The script of an unreleased (aside from three scenes) horror movie. 2) The making of that movie. 3) The efforts to remake the movie decades later.

I really enjoyed the book’s structure of switching between these three stands to tell the story of the Thin Kid (both the character and the actor!). From page one I was intrigued by discovering what went wrong on the set of this movie and I loved that our narrator was unreliable. The horror was definitely there but I kind of felt like I was kept at arm’s length from it. There were definitely some disturbing things going on, but it was never too much to read (for me at least) thanks to the slightly distance writing style.

A sense of momentum builds and builds as we close in on the ending of the movie and I absolutely loved where the story ended up. It’s weird and might not work for everyone but I thought it was fantastic.