A chilling twist on the “cursed film” genre from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club and The Cabin at the End of the World. In June 1993, a group of young guerilla filmmakers spent four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious ...

Tremblay's horror novel about an incomplete film works really well where it needs to - as a scary story. Horror Movie looks at a student film project through three lens: the script of the movie, the remembered experience filming it by the actor who played the Thin Kid, and that actor in the present as a new team recruits him to create a new finished version of the film. Where the novel shines is in the story of the original film. Tremblay does a masterful job of not explaining things as he shows four kids performing a long tortuous ritual to turn one of them into a monster. The horror of the novel lies in the cruelty that's inflicted on the Thin Kid, and Tremblay parallels that nicely with the recklessness of the film set and the one mindedness of the filmmakers. The plot is sketched a little too vaguely towards the end of the story and while we could piece together the conclusion, we wish Tremblay had been a bit clearer about some of the final actions. None of that takes away from the skill of this work. Making a reported incident like a screenplay scary is hard, and we tip our hat to Tremblay for again giving us a nice scare to read in spooky season.