54 pages • 1 hour read
Paul TremblayHorror Movie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: Cursed Films
In the subculture of horror movie fandom, “cursed” films are movies whose troubled production histories enable horror fans to appreciate the film through the lens of superstition. Under this overarching assumption, on-set mishaps are often attributed to the presence of an unseen malevolent force, or alternately a spiritual force that is attempting to prevent the “evil” energy of a horror film from being released into the world.
A popular example of a cursed film is the 1973 supernatural horror film, The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin. The film stretched long past its planned schedule and budget because of multiple on-set accidents, including injuries suffered by the cast and crew. Several people associated with the cast and crew also died around the time of production, resulting in further delays. Whether consciously or not, Friedkin himself engendered speculation about the film’s cursed status by citing the film’s subject matter, demonic possession, as a possible cause for these incidents in magazine interviews. Critics have later attributed these statements to marketing, intended to build morbid curiosity around the resulting film. This exposes a critical flaw in the cursed film theory, which downplays or exploits the real suffering of film workers for the sake of the film’s box office profitability.
Tremblay’s novel tackles the concept of the cursed film by tracing the production of a fictional movie and showing how the apocryphal legends surrounding it might spawn a cultural impact like that of real-life horror movies. Tremblay has cited the 1974 Tobe Hooper film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as an inspiration for Horror Movie. He references it not only by name but through a conscious homage in the novel’s climactic death scene. Cleo’s death scene is meant to mirror an incident on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s set, where actor Gunnar Hansen brought an active chainsaw dangerously close to the face of fellow actor William Vail. Tremblay goes on to critique the commercial exploitation of the cursed film trend by having the characters conjure false anecdotes about their movie’s production to build enthusiasm for a reboot. The actors double down on these anecdotes as part of the film’s official history, paralleling their transformation into the monstrous villains of the very film they are making.
Genre and Author Context: Paul Tremblay and Metafictional Horror
Metafiction is a genre of postmodern fiction that consciously calls attention to matters of narrative form and structure. The intended effect is to heighten the reader’s awareness to the fictional nature of the work they are reading while also making them question the conditions of the reality that surrounds them. Paired with horror, metafiction offers readers a deeper immersion into the dread that defines horror texts by superimposing the subject matter against the text object the readers are interpreting. This forces the reader to question whether the subject matter of the work is real or fictional, even as the text utilizes speculative elements to forward its plot.
Tremblay’s 2015 novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, is a strong example of metafictional horror, Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality through its primary narrative frame. The main narrative unfolds as a series of interviews between an author and the sister of a girl whose demonic possession was covered in a sensationalized television documentary that aired several years before the start of the novel. While the documentary calls to mind the paranormal genre of reality television, the interview format allows the characters to occupy the same narrative distance that the reader does from those reality shows. The interview is frequently interrupted by blog posts in which a third character comments on the events of the documentary, intended to mirror the thoughts and evaluations of the reader as the plot progresses. These evocations have the overall effect of steeping the reader in the reality of the world Tremblay has constructed.
He similarly deploys this technique in Horror Movie, depicting not only the manifestations of the titular film’s cultural impact, but also the very text of the film the culture is reacting to in screenplay format. Tremblay obfuscates the reality of the narrative by having the characters of the novel play thinly veiled avatars of themselves in the film they are making. Without any details to distinguish the film versions of the characters from their “real” selves in the novel, the reader is forced to conflate them. This is crucial in fulfilling the narrative arc of the novel’s main character, who never gives his real name but comes to identify with the character he is playing, “The Thin Kid.”
