Low-Budget Monsters and High-Price Consequences

Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie: a Novel

Thirty years ago, when longshot indie movies became a realistic media presence, four New England kids decided to make a horror film. Decades later, the unfinished movie’s moldering remains have become a viral internet sensation, and the last surviving cast member is involved in helping the production “go Hollywood.” Between the two stories of cinematic hubris, one survivor recounts his tale of deep immersion, and the stains that don’t wash off.

Stoker Award-winning novelist Paul Tremblay’s books are often deemed “postmodern” because they comment on storytelling and the creative process. In this one, the nameless narrator recounts the two productions of his horror movie, entitled Horror Movie. Tremblay divides the novel into three braided strands: “Then,” “Now,” and the screenplay from the unfinished movie. Each, in various ways, criticizes the Hollywood process, while praising the human relationships which make Hollywood possible.

In the “Then” section, set mostly in 1993, a trio of starry-eyed artistes dragoons our narrator into their movie, mostly because a key prop fits his face. The movie, featuring adults playing teenagers in the 1990s style, addresses adolescent themes that seem simultaneously dated, and completely timeless. We know, because the narrator warns us, that this production ends in tragedy; we wait tentatively to discover what happens.

The “Now” section, set in 2023, describes how our narrator collaborates with a major studio to remake the unfinished movie. The original director used the internet to create buzz around a movie nobody saw, and the broken lives left in the movie’s wake, before she died—a death revealed only slowly. Our narrator gives the “E! True Hollywood Story” version, but only through his own, distinctly traumatized viewpoint.

Finally, the screenplay is… well… unfilmable. It represents the grandiosity that infected would-be auteurs after Kevin Smith and Richard Linklater made guerilla filmmaking look easy. Three teenagers turn the pain and ennui of suburban life into tortures they inflict on their anonymous friend, naively yearning to live inside their favorite horror films. They want, but don’t want, to create a monster. The script includes long, discursive passages which voice the screenwriter’s private misery.

Paul Tremblay

The word “metafiction” has been tossed around so heedlessly in recent years, that it’s become a parody of itself. We know the boilerplates: characters leaning on the fourth wall, aware they’re fictional constructs, commenting directly on the art-making process or the relationship with the audience. Sometimes it’s cute. But, like any movement that becomes sufficiently popular, it’s become cheapened by imitators who prefer the trappings to the substance.

Therefore, how readers receive Tremblay’s story will depend on what they bring into the experience. Fans of horror films from the peak slasher era will certainly recognize themselves. Tremblay’s characters, like their movie, and presumably like his intended audience, have been well-off and comfortable for long enough to become numb. His characters want to feel something, anything. However, their bid to create feeling, only spreads misery around.

Our narrator has confabs with Hollywood producers, attends fan conventions, collaborates with the countless hard-working technicians who make movies possible—all without telling us his name. He’s a complete cypher, an anonymous everyman moving through life propelled by others’ demands. Even before the unfinished movie made him legendary, it’s clear the aspiring auteurs cast him because he was someone they could control, and he never completely escapes them.

The overall result is thus less frightening than knowing. Tremblay doesn’t just signpost the looming moments, the tropes where horror cinema spills into its characters’ lives; he actively warns us what’s coming. When something gory finally happens, we already know the broad strokes; we only await Tremblay describing the finer details. Reading, we feel anxiety and anticipation, but never really fear.

This isn’t entirely a criticism. Tremblay presents a literary novel about horror, without necessarily being horror. Throughout the novel, Tremblay brings out themes of characters desperate to feel something, anything. The feelings they achieve, however, prove transitory and meaningless. Even the denouement, where the narrator finally shows some gumption, ends with him admitting: I don’t know what happens next. You, the fans, need to tell me.

Perhaps this reflects Tremblay’s own disappointment. Hollywood optioned his 2018 novel The Cabin at the End of the World, handed it to M. Night Shyamalan, and it did okay without making any waves. One can read this novel as a statement of both disillusionment and powerlessness. It teems with knowing winks to Tremblay’s intended audience, who watch these movies regularly. And it reminds them that, sometimes, it’s okay to feel nothing.

The Other Boy Who Could Fly

John Leonard Pielmeier, Hook's Tale: Being the Account of an Unjustly Villainized Pirate Written By Himself

First, his name isn’t Hook. James Cook, great-grandson of the explorer James Cook, is press-ganged into the Queen’s Navy, aged 14, ending his London childhood and Eton education forever. But rumors of treasure lead to mutiny, and Cook finds himself sailing under the Black Flag. Soon his ship crosses the line into a mysterious land where nobody, not even little boys dressed in tattered leaves, ever grows up.

American author John Leonard Pielmeier is probably best-known for his play, and later film adaptation, Agnes of God. Since that classic, he’s become an in-demand screenwriter, especially for adaptations of heavy, difficult literature. But he admits, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan first awakened his interest in reading, and in his first novel, he returns to Neverland, retelling the story from the forsaken antihero’s perspective.

Cook finds himself orphaned, expelled, and pressed in quick succession. A comforting life of middle-class London innocence surrenders to harsh sailors’ compromises. Under his captain’s Puritanical supervision, Cook toughens his skin, practices his Latin, and conquers his ignorance. Soon he’s a real sailor. Then the mutiny forces him to choose between honesty and survival. And, on a distant Neverland shore, he finds a castaway who remembers Cook’s long-lost father.

If Peter Pan is the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, James Cook is the Boy Who Has Adulthood Thrust Upon Him Violently. There’s a Luke Skywalker quality to Cook’s transition, but he often learns the wrong lessons. He abandons his post to discover more about his father. He nurses petty grudges and pursues vengeance so far, he inadvertently injures himself. He admits lying to achieve his ends—then demands we trust him, not Barrie, to tell the real story.

Peter Pan, meanwhile, proves himself capricious, controlling, and worse. Marooned by his shipmates, Cook meets Peter, and both are overjoyed to finally make friends their own age. But Cook doesn’t want to stay fourteen forever. He faces a monster so terrible, even Peter can’t stomach it, and in so doing, wins Tiger Lily’s heart. Peter, jealous that his friend doesn’t live in the eternal present, murders her. Or so Cook says.

John Leonard Pielmeier

Pielmeier strips Barrie’s Edwardian sensationalism. Cook repeatedly insists he’s no pirate, but an orphan caught in something beyond his control. He’s certainly not Blackbeard’s bo'sun. The Piccaninnies aren’t a stereotyped Plains Indian tribe, they’re a proud Polynesian nation, the Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini. And Neverland isn’t a haven of eternal innocent irresponsibility, it’s a land of Lotus-Eaters where all time gets compressed into Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.

Repeatedly, Cook insists he’s no villain. Yet he’s exactly that, if accidentally: everywhere he goes, his presence disrupts the balance. Gentleman Starkey initiates the mutiny because he finds Cook’s treasure map. Peter and the Pa-Ku-U-Na-Ini live in peaceful rapport until Cook interrupts their religious ceremony, breaks Tiger Lily’s prior engagement, and leaves Peter friendless. He even accidentally hastens the Wendy Darling’s kidnapping.

Critics have seen, in Barrie’s Peter Pan, an enactment of the Oedipal conflict, as Peter battles the piratical father-figure and must choose between three ideals of womanhood. I see, in Pielmeier’s Cook, a dark mirror of Campbell’s Heroic Journey metaphor. Pielmeier hits every marker: the Call to Adventure, the Threshold, the Road of Trials, the Temptress, even the Return. But unlike Campbell’s hero, at every opportunity, Cook makes the wrong choice.

Cook insists he’s innocent. But everywhere he goes, he leaves a trail of broken souls and dead bodies. He insists upon his own honesty, and gives a detailed accounting of his actions, while he admits lying to achieve selfish ends. Though book-smart and crafty, he lacks wisdom, perhaps because his lifetime’s experiences don’t match his bodily appearance. Thus, instead of achieving enlightenment, he becomes driven by vengeance and rage.

Maria Tatar writes, of Barrie’s original play and novel, that the dominant theme is futility. The Lost Boys, Piccaninnies, and pirates pursue one another in a permanent clockwise pattern around the island, perpetually enacting time, though they never age. Pielmeier disrupts that: Cook enters a magic archipelago where time means nothing, but instead he brings change. He brings mortality into a land without age. But he never understands this.

Pielmeier isn’t the first author to rewrite Hook’s backstory. Besides Barrie himself, recent entries have included J.V. Hart, Christina Henry, and Dave Barry. However, I particularly like Pielmeier’s psychological depth and emotional complexity. Pielmeier’s Cook is a master schemer, but also a master of self-deception. He successfully complicates Barrie’s original story, but only at great cost to himself, which he clearly hasn’t begun to understand.