Horror Movie

“A movie is a collection of beautiful lies that somehow add up to being the truth, or a truth. In this case an ugly one. But the first spoken line in any movie is not a lie and is always the truest.”

Valentina marks the beginning of production with a sweeping statement about the truthfulness of film. While she is speaking to the importance of emotional truth over literal truth—a statement that Cleo will echo in Chapter 19—the passage also resonates with Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality as a theme. The artifice of the film is meant to reveal the reality of Cleo’s teenage fears.

“We do not, cannot, and will not clearly see the Thin Kid’s face.

But we almost see him, and later, we will have a false memory of having seen his face.

That face will be built by what isn’t seen, built from an amalgam of other faces, faces of people we know and people we’ve seen on television and movies and within crowds. Perhaps we’ll imagine a kind face when it is more likely he has a face, to our enduring shame, that does not inspire our kindness.”

In the same way that the narrator depicts himself as a malleable character, the Thin Kid is depicted as being open to viewer projection and interpretation. He is never clearly shown to the viewer because it would allow the viewer to distinguish him from themselves. Without a clear image of the Thin Kid, the viewer would have to rely on their subconscious to make sense of him.

“The twitchy glances, look-aways, and the we-don’t-know-who-we-are-yet-but-I-hope-other-people-like-me half smiles we were all made of in college had hardened and sharpened into confidence of purpose but not yet disappointment. Maybe it was a mask. We all wear them.”

This passage drives the motif of the mask by observing how people wear masks all the time, even in ordinary social situations. The masks people wear are meant to filter their identity for other people’s approval, reducing their identity to whatever they choose to reveal.

“By the end of our meeting and meal, having that unvarnished attention paid to me when I’d been so used to hiding, even if it felt uncomfortable and intrusive, was intoxicating. That feeling was why I said yes without saying it. It felt like a chance to create another version of myself, one over which I’d have more control. Which, of course, was ludicrous and wildly wrong. I’d be changed, but would it be by my own hands? Fuck me, I sound like a pretentious actor.”

In this passage, the narrator explains his motivations for taking on the role of the Thin Kid. Dissatisfied with the direction his life has taken, he wants to reassert control by roleplaying. The fact that he deflates the sincerity of his intentions through self-deprecation at the end hints at his self-consciousness and fear of vulnerability.

“The mask is ugly and grotesque and familiar, and we cannot stop staring at it because all monsters are mirrors.”

In this passage, Tremblay interrogates the morbid curiosity people have with horror monsters. He suggests that the reason for horror’s enduring appeal is its ability to confront the grotesque aspects of life that people are too afraid to engage with in day-to-day life. This is why the mask is also described as being “familiar” despite the two matching adjectives that precede it.

“She described her panicked flight from the school, the knocks and slaps of her own fleeing footsteps, not daring to breathe until she left the building, and once she was outside, the world appeared changed by what she’d seen. Cleo corrected herself; of course the world wasn’t changed—and here for the only time in her tale, she stammered, searching for the right words. The world was the same, but a new part of it had been revealed. Even if what she found wasn’t a head, the world was indeed a place in which she might find one.”

This passage could easily be interpreted as a statement on the power of art. After her first encounter with the mask, Cleo briefly thinks that reality has changed, allowing for her encounter with the disembodied monster head to make sense. With distance, she realizes that the world has always been this way. This mirrors her writing process as she describes it later, reflecting on her teenage fears with distance as an adult.

“It’s not about replicating a specific time. A movie—any movie, even one that fails—is a conversation with the viewer who chooses to engage. This movie will communicate emotional truths that can only be communicated by the language of film and of horror. If we do it right, the movie will speak to us now as it would’ve thirty years ago and as it will thirty years from now, if any of us are still around, projecting movies onto the walls of ruined buildings.”

Marlee’s filmmaking philosophy is defined by her film’s engagement with the viewer. This makes her the true successor to Cleo and Valentina, especially when compared to the other potential directors who merely offer gimmick ideas for how they might execute a remake of Horror Movie. Key to her philosophy is the emphasis on continued relevance, allowing her film to resonate with future audiences. This ties into The Costs of Creating a Cultural Legacy as a theme.

“I wasn’t given any acting instruction with the pages, but it was easy to imagine myself as this Thin Kid, so I did. I gave him my high school background. […] While those wounds still stung when I prodded at them, I spent more mental energy rebuilding the smoglike indifference and dullness of my prior teenage life. I believed that was where I would find the Thin Kid […]. In this mundane way, I would inhabit the Thin Kid until he could inhabit me.”

To prepare himself for the role of the Thin Kid, the narrator uses his personal background to inform his understanding of the character. By doing so, he subtly starts Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality, creating an overlap that allows him to seek comfort from the Thin Kid during moments of physical and emotional danger.

“With the mask on, people wouldn’t see my face as the rest of me was being seen. It wasn’t so much altering my identity as covering it, shrouding it, making myself into a blank, but not a blank the observer could fill with their judgments.

With the mask I could be inscrutable, maybe even implacable.”

This passage shows the narrator forming an emotional connection with the Thin Kid mask, allowing him to use it as an escape in moments of vulnerability. Just as the mask allows him to be “implacable,” it conversely exposes his sensitivity and weakness. He fears being perceived as meek and gentle.

“I wasn’t a brave person, and I am still not a brave person, and I don’t know if sitting in that tiny supply room qualified me as being almost brave, but I willed myself into staying by pretending I wasn’t me. I was him.”

The narrator has the tendency to attribute all his character strengths to the Thin Kid persona, as evidenced by this passage. He overwrites his cowardice by suggesting that he must live in character to leverage the Thin Kid’s persistence. This is an elaborate lie, however, considering that the Thin Kid is fictional. He would rather accept that lie as the truth than accept his capacity to grow beyond his personal weaknesses.

“The mask lacks a presence or essence that is only there when I put it over my head, which is part of its genius. The mask is both vessel and void, and it drudges a vital aspect of the wearer that it lays bare upon its surface.”

In this passage, the narrator tries to prove that his relationship with the mask isn’t symbiotic, but codependent. He argues that without a wearer, the mask lacks power and presence. This validates the narrator because it makes him feel like a necessary element for the creation of the Thin Kid.

“I asked, ‘Who hasn’t stubbed out a cigarette on themselves before?’ and no one answered. The implication was I had done so before. Therefore, the question was a kind of lie, as I hadn’t burned myself like that. But it wasn’t a full lie, either, because the Thin Kid in my head had had it happen to him, many times. Because he and I had already read the scene we were about to shoot, it meant the scene had happened to him, to us.”

This passage represents the narrator’s justification for suffering as an artist. He argues that harming him for the sake of the film aligns with the reality of the Thin Kid’s experience. By enacting that harm in real life, they are taking an extra step to immerse the viewer in that reality. This not only moves forward Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality as a theme, but it also raises questions about The Ethics of Horror Movie Production.

“Fans. Do I call them fans? Fans of what, precisely? Fans of a movie that existed purely within their imagination? How different was that from the movies you’ve seen, really? After you’ve viewed them, they only existed in your head too.”

The narrator comments on the irony of fandom culture, pointing out that the fans of Horror Movie are responding to a film that they never actually saw. While he suggests that the film they enjoyed is a figment of their imagination, he gradually observes that the same can be said of any other film, which isn’t meaningful on its own but has been synthesized into something meaningful by the viewer.

“She doesn’t think her theory is original or revolutionary or anything like that. Worse, she fears it’s a rationalization for what she is doing, for what she has set in motion, and if she were being honest with herself, she never dreamed it would’ve gotten this far. She thought someone would’ve stopped it all by now. Why couldn’t she stop it? Thoughts and events have a way of gathering momentum, and the brain’s natural state is one of perseveration, not preservation.

Cleo wants to say, My theory is that we’re in hell. Some of us are demons and some of us make demons because we don’t know what else to do.”

This passage from the Horror Movie screenplay comes closest to representing the teens’ motivations for transforming the Thin Kid into a monster. In her cynical worldview, Cleo believes that they are incapable of doing anything but creating monsters, though she does not know if she is pushing this theory to absolve herself from her participation in the ritual. Importantly, Cleo’s theory resonates with the teens’ emotional motivations, rather than their literal reasons for driving the transformation, which resonates with real-world Cleo’s motivations for writing Horror Movie.

“Now, in my memory, the memory is the movie. I saw the teenage partygoers and they saw me ascending, and their beautiful faces were made even more beautiful by their shiny-eyed expressions of awe and adoration, and they would’ve bowed before me were it necessary but they were already below me […]. The landing, which happened before I could prepare with bent knees, jarred me out of the movie, a cruel shock of reality manifesting as my lower back fucking screamed with pain like it had after those miserable summer workdays when I had unloaded the frozen-meat trucks. There were no partygoers with shining eyes in the backyard. Only Mark was there as a spotter, to keep me from falling.”

This passage demonstrates Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality as a theme by showing how the narrator’s emotional experience in the Thin Kid role has overwritten his real experience of the production. The narrator conflates the details of the scene with his performance of the stunt because of the emotional validation the fantasy gives him. It is only when he hits the ground that he literally grounds himself in the reality of what happened.

“People can’t help but want their fiction and its players to be real, and they want their reality to follow the comforting rules and beats of fiction.”

When Marlee asks him about the anachronisms in Cleo’s screenplay, the narrator makes this pronouncement, which bears a tone of condescension. It ties into Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality as a theme by observing the ways audiences fail to see the discrepancies between fiction and real life. By distancing himself from the “people” he observes, the narrator underlines his cynical qualities, thinking himself better than them by acknowledging that real life doesn’t arrange itself around the structures of meaning inherent to fiction.

“There, I sacrificed a chunk of flesh to make more money off my fake celebrity, like you said. Wouldn’t that be perfect? And what would that say about me, right? Who would do such a thing?”

When the narrator poses a counter-challenge to the fan who confronts him at the convention, he subtly foreshadows his confessions in the novel’s closing chapters. At the same time, he quietly reveals his reasons for propping the mythology around the production as the truth—the lie is preferable to the reality and what it implies. The narrator’s attempt to rewrite history is an attempt to regain control of his listless life.

“We wonder who the strangers are, who they really are. We wonder what their lives are like and if they’re good people. We wonder what their secrets are. We wonder how many people in the theater have done terrible, unspeakable things. We wonder how many human monsters—because there are so many, varied kinds—are in the theater with us. We wonder how many of them would happily treat us like the Thin Kid. Some of us imagine looking at ourselves through a stranger’s eyes. Is this imagined stranger afraid of us? Should they be afraid of us? Who or what is a good person, anyway? What does that mean? Then we look at our friends or our significant others, who talk and have stopped paying cursory attention to the screen. We wonder how well we know them, and without articulating the following in a direct thought, it’s as though our loved ones sitting in a large, dark room is a metaphor for how unknowable they really are.”

In a surreal passage from the screenplay, Cleo turns her attention to the audience, suggesting not what is happening onscreen but what is happening emotionally to the audience members as they react to the film. To distract themselves from the tedium of Karson’s extended death scene, the viewers are left to redirect their attention to the people around them, projecting their interpretations of the characters in the film upon the other viewers.

“We know that Karson is going to die at the end of this scene, whenever it ends. We know that he knows he is going to die. Whether some of us think Karson deserves what is going to happen to him, it’s going to happen to him anyway. We know that what we’re watching, what we’re experiencing, is Karson waiting for his death. We know death will eventually—in one more second, one more minute, one more year—fill the doorway and stare back at him, as it’ll one day stare back at us too.

[…] We can stare or look away and pretend it’s not there, and it doesn’t matter, because death will fill our next doorway eventually.”

Tremblay uses this passage to underline one of the great truths that gives horror its enduring appeal. As the viewer waits for the Thin Kid to reach Karson, they are reminded of the inevitability of death. Through a metanarrative lens, this reflects the conventions of horror and encourages readers or viewers to expect that death will happen and therefore consider their own relationship to mortality.

“Have you ever worn a mask, really worn one for a significant length of time? The best way, the only way, to acclimate to the discomfort of having your head enveloped and the disorientation that accompanies your winnowed field of vision is to learn another way of being. […] With the mask layered over your face, allow yourself, what you think of as your self, to sink, to recede. Then the mask will step forward and show you a new way to breathe.”

In this passage, the narrator describes how the mask mediates his transformation into the Thin Kid. To brace himself for his role in Valentina’s plan, he focuses on the discomfort of the mask and allows the Thin Kid to inhabit him, using his experience of suffering to overcome the discomfort and repress his identity as the narrator. The mask therefore cements itself as a motif for Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality.

“I wanted to tell her that it was okay, that it was me, not the Thin Kid. But the mask was on, which meant the no-talking rules were in place. The longer we sat in silence, the more I knew this was a mistake, yet another in a series of terrible mistakes. But maybe it wasn’t too late. If I took off my mask, I could stop everything else from happening. Choice being real and an illusion at the same time is a horror. It’s all a wonderful, sublime horror.”

While he adopts the Thin Kid persona, the narrator is constantly aware of his choice to break the illusion and assert reality. However, because the narrator has been characterized by his meekness and fear of vulnerability, he renders himself powerless to overcome the Thin Kid, who is characterized by his willingness to endure suffering. The narrator submits his ability to opt out of the roleplay because he emotionally relies on the agency and power that being the Thin Kid gives him. His ability to choose a life beyond Horror Movie becomes one of The Costs of Creating a Cultural Legacy.

“Cleo climbs the stairs two at a time. Some of us—probably only a few—notice she has one hand on the railing, and she pumps her other arm while climbing, or in other words, her hands are not in her pockets as she climbs these stairs.

The movie-watching part of our brains might interpret this as a physical manifestation of her desperation to live, an admission that she’s not as in control of what’s happening as she and we thought. We are more scared for her because of it.”

Although Cleo will soon reveal that she no longer wants to die in Chapter 19, this passage from the screenplay foreshadows the distinction she draws between her onscreen persona and her real-world personality. Driven by her willingness to undo the horrors she has done, Cleo inadvertently reveals that she has wanted to live all along, which not only affirms her motivations for wanting to write the film in the first place, but also raises the stakes for her character in the film.

“I wrote about what scares me, even if I can’t fully describe what scares me. What I said a minute ago is only part of what scares me. The screenplay is the full explanation, or exploration. Who was it that said trust your subconscious when writing? That’s what I did. There are so many types of horror movies and different ways of approaching them. My favorites are like fever dreams that on the surface defy the logic of our everyday yet, somehow, expose what’s really underneath. Those movies are so real—like, too real—and as disturbing as that can be, it feels kind of, I don’t know, wonderful.”

Cleo explains her reasons for writing the movie in this passage. By acknowledging that the film allows her to confront and capture her fears in ways she cannot articulate through pure language, she also transforms them into something she can control, asserting her power over those fears. This is what makes horror feel “wonderful” in her eyes, thus stressing her desire to keep living.