54 pages • 1 hour read
Horror Movie
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Chapters 17-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Now: Feral FX Part 2”
While preparing to make the life cast, Janelle notices that the narrator’s body is covered in scales. He explains that they are tattoos meant to cover up scars, including his cigarette burn, though his internal monologue suggests that he is telling only a half-truth.
The makeup team starts applying the latex, which will stay on the narrator for 90 minutes. They give him hand signals to ask for help, as well as a notebook for messages. The narrator is comfortable for a while, imagining what would happen if he was left inside the cast overnight. When the plaster hardens, the narrator feels trapped.
Ninety minutes later, the narrator is freed from the cast. Janelle observes that the scales indented his chest mold. The narrator ominously gives no explanation for it.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Then: Valentina’s House Part 2”
The narrator wears the mask back into Valentina’s house, observing the no-talking rule that he had exercised as the Thin Kid on set. Valentina leads him into her office and lets him watch her upload the film clips to YouTube, as well as the screenplay to her website and other sites.
Valentina then brings the narrator upstairs to her room. She asks him to lie down on her bed but pretend he is under it. Stepping back out, she explains through the door how she plans to build up the legend of the movie. They return to the living room, where she gives him some of her OxyContin medication. When the narrator can no longer feel his hand, Valentina cuts his pinky off. Once the bleeding stops, they part ways without acknowledgment. The narrator goes to a hospital to treat his wound. Afterward, he admires his severed pinky and swallows it like in the script.
In the screenplay, Cleo reaches Karson’s house, beholding the contents of the garage with fascination. The Thin Kid emerges from the house carrying Karson’s corpse. Cleo lets the Thin Kid chase her to the abandoned school. The Thin Kid gets distracted by a lit house and is about to enter it when Cleo screams the way she did in the audio recording, drawing the Thin Kid’s attention back to her. The reach the school. When Cleo climbs the stairs, she uses the handrail instead of putting her hands in her pockets.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Then: The End”
The crew reaches the last day of photography, covering the penultimate scene where Cleo dies. Before the shoot, Cleo invites the narrator to brunch. She expresses her regret that the shoot has harmed the narrator’s well-being. She encourages him to eat, and he expresses relief over eating a hearty breakfast. They share their respective plans for life after the shoot.
Cleo admits that her character is a near-direct analogue of her real self. This includes her habit of keeping her hands in her pockets whenever she climbs stairs, signaling her teenage desire to die. She clarifies that she doesn’t want to die now, but everything in the movie is meant to resonate with real fears she has experienced throughout her life. She cannot articulate the extent of her fears, but wants the movie to make her fear feel so real that it becomes wonderful. The narrator expresses his concern that he is becoming someone Cleo created, more than his own person. Cleo quips that it’s the mask’s fault, not hers.
In the screenplay, Cleo reaches the classroom and retrieves Karson’s chainsaw. She struggles to start it as the Thin Kid approaches. When the chainsaw finally starts, Cleo holds the Thin Kid back.
The novel shifts back to the production, the crew struggling through several takes of Cleo holding back the Thin Kid. Everyone is frustrated and nervous, except for Cleo. Despite Dan’s safety objections, the chainsaw remains fitted with a real chain, allowing Valentina to show it to the viewer in close-up.
The novel continues alternating between the screenplay and the production. Cleo and the Thin Kid dance between thrusts of the chainsaw. The effort exhausts the narrator, which he feels guilty about in retrospect. The chain is removed in between shots, allowing the two actors to make contact during their fight scene. This annoys Valentina, who increases the shot number so she can cut the scene into something realistic.
In the screenplay, Cleo rushes to strike the Thin Kid, but he grapples the chainsaw, holding it above them both. He strikes Cleo, forcing her to drop the chainsaw. He then retrieves the chainsaw, prompting Cleo to rush at him and force another grapple. The Thin Kid uses his strength to push her onto the teacher’s desk.
During filming, Valentina forces a decision to reinsert the chain into the chainsaw. The narrator is asked to do practice runs with the mannequin to ensure Cleo’s safety. The table is rigged to shield Cleo from danger. The crew suggest other ways to increase Cleo’s safety, like cutting bigger eyeholes in the Thin Kid mask to help him see Cleo better. The narrator stays in character, remaining silent all throughout the discussion.
In the screenplay, Valentina arrives at the classroom, but merely watches the struggle between Cleo and the Thin Kid instead of intervening. She calls out to Cleo as the Thin Kid kills her. He tosses the chainsaw aside and nudges her affectionately to see if she is still alive.
In the real life filming, Cleo lets go of the chainsaw and places her hand into her pocket. She uses her other hand to pull the chainsaw toward her, drawing the narrator’s attention. The narrator remembers the look on her face for the rest of his life but refuses to describe or interpret it. Cleo apologizes to him as she pulls the chainsaw again and sits up, allowing it to kill her. The proceeding court trial results in the conclusion that Cleo died by suicide. As the time goes by, the narrator becomes increasingly unsure of how much force he applied once the chainsaw met Cleo’s body.
In the screenplay, Valentina urges the Thin Kid to escape with her. The symbol on the floor has disappeared. Valentina brings the Thin Kid to her room and has him hide under her bed. The bloodstains he leaves on the floor vaguely resemble the symbol. Valentina cleans the blood, then goes to bed, ending the film.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Now: The End”
The narrator discusses the anticlimactic nature of the ending he has chosen for his memoir. He instead offers details on the reboot, the production of which has greatly disappointed him. He predicts that the movie will do well but will have minor cultural staying power. He appreciates the new cast, though they are merely a stark reminder of the original cast’s idiosyncrasies. The new Thin Kid actor, however, isolates himself from the production and observes the no-speaking rule.
The narrator explains that he had been expecting something more fulfilling from the reboot. He reveals that his participation in the film has been minimized, though he can only speculate on the possible reasons for this, including his insistence on wearing the original mask and the report of his body modifications spreading to executives. The narrator now only appears in Karson’s death scene, which he similarly feels is anticlimactic. He plans, however, to volunteer to appear in Cleo’s death scene, which they are currently shooting.
The narrator hides overnight in the new Thin Kid actor’s trailer. He sets up cameras and paints Cleo’s symbol on the floor using his own blood. He then transforms into the scale-covered Thin Kid. When the Thin Kid actor arrives, the narrator chokes him and bites through his mask until he is dead. Hiding the actor under the bed, the narrator transforms again to resemble the now-dead actor. He plans to change the ending of the film so that it doesn’t conclude in Valentina’s room, but with a scene that resonates with the original film “in the spirit of self-destruction” (275). He suggests that he might come back to the trailer and eat the Thin Kid actor, go on a killing spree, or wander the Earth as the Thin Kid on a never-ending livestream. He addresses the reader and says the will find out the ending he chose when they watch the movie.
Chapters 17-20 Analysis
The novel ends with the narrator’s complete transformation into the Thin Kid, which is formalized in two parallel events—the death of Cleo and the death of the actor who replaced the narrator in the reboot. The death of Cleo is complicated by the narrator’s unreliable telling and the events that directly precede the last day of shooting. Cleo’s admission that the screenplay represents her teenage feelings, but not her adult feelings, clashes directly with the narrator’s assertion that Cleo died by suicide. Because Cleo cannot speak for herself at the trial investigating her death, the trial relies on the word of her cast and crewmates, all of whom have an incentive to embellish the truth the way the narrator has been doing throughout the novel. In the parlance of horror, the possibility that the crew might have lied to escape prosecution becomes the reason they are cursed, systematically dying until only the narrator is left. Tremblay leaves the true nature of Cleo’s death ambiguous, but the fact that her death remains so mysterious many years later and the fact that she died at all speak to The Ethics of Horror Movie Production as a theme.
Frustrated by the reboot, the narrator rejects the idea that the original Horror Movie can ever be remade to his satisfaction. His resolution is to increase his participation in the film by usurping the role of the Thin Kid back from the new actor in the reboot. His full transformation into the Thin Kid, followed by his attempt to mimic the new actor, is the ultimate form of Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality. The genre rules that facilitated the movement of the screenplay bleed over into the narrator’s reality, aiming to displace the reader’s sense of what is real and what isn’t.
Just as it isn’t clear whether the narrator is embellishing the story of Cleo’s death, it also isn’t clear if he is embellishing the way his story finishes in order to avoid a similarly dissatisfying, anticlimactic ending. Ultimately, Tremblay presents the reader with an interpretative choice. If the narrator is capable of killing the actor who replaces him, the text suggests that he could exert the same kind of violence against Cleo using the reasoning that it is something the Thin Kid has already done. On the other hand, if the narrator isn’t lying about Cleo’s death, then it begs the question of how he could bring himself to kill his replacement.
Going some way toward resolving this ambiguity, the Thin Kid persona that the narrator adopts at the end of the novel grows beyond the character as presented in the screenplay. One clear difference between the narrator and the Thin Kid is that the Thin Kid is always presented as being obedient and submissive to the teens, even to the point of dropping his performance as a slasher after Cleo dies. By the end of the novel, the narrator takes ownership of his destiny to inhabit his role. On one hand, he is following Valentina’s directive to finish the film. On the other hand, he is left to decide how to execute that directive on his own, whether that means withholding the truth about the screenplay from Marlee in Chapter 15 or killing the new actor to perpetuate the Thin Kid’s cultural legacy. The idea that the narrator takes matters into his own hands is a fulfillment of his narrative arc, turning from someone who has no direction or assertive power into someone who will do whatever it takes to realize his intentions.
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