Horror Movie (eBook)

Paul Tremblay (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
352 Seiten
TITAN BOOKS (Verlag)
978-1-80336-430-8 (ISBN)

Infos

'Slasher movies are seen by some as kitschy fun, but this is a seriously disturbing novel, delving into the sacrifices art demands, psychological trauma and how monsters are made. Sometimes painful reading, it's also incredibly gripping, smart and scary.' The Guardian The New York Times bestseller! Includes bonus content - see concept notes and pages from Tremblay's notebooks. The monster at the heart of a cult 90s cursed horror film tells his shocking and bloody secret history. Slow burn terror meets high-stakes showdowns, from the bestselling author of A Head Full of Ghosts and The Cabin at the End of the World. Summer, 1993 - a group of young guerrilla filmmakers spend four weeks making Horror Movie, a notorious, disturbing, art-house horror film. The weird part? Only three of the film's scenes were ever released to the public. Steeped in mystery and tragedy, the film has taken on a mythic renown. Decades later, a big budget reboot is in the works, and Hollywood turns to the only surviving cast member - the man who played 'the Thin Kid', the masked teen at the centre of it all. He remembers all too well the secrets buried within the original screenplay, the bizarre events of the filming, and the crossed lines on set. Caught in a nightmare of masks and appearances, facile Hollywood personalities and fan conventions, the Thin Kid spins a tale of past and present, scripts and reality, and what the camera lets us see. But at what cost do we revisit our demons? After all these years, the monster the world never saw will finally be heard.

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards and is the author of Disappearance at Devil's Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, Growing Things, Survivor Song and The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland omnibus. He is currently a member of the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in Entertainment Weekly.com, and numerous year's-best anthologies. He lives outside Boston with his family.

Textauszug

THEN: THE PITCH PART 1

3

In mid-April of 1993 Valentina left a message on my apartment’s answering machine. We hadn’t talked for almost two years. She got the phone number from my mother, who was awful free with those digits, if you ask me. Valentina said she had a proposition, laughed, apologized for laughing, and then she assured me the proposition was serious. How could I resist?

She and I didn’t go to college together, but we’d met as undergrads. I bused tables and worked at Hugo’s in Northampton, a bar that was close enough to campus that my shitbox car could survive the drive and far enough away that I wouldn’t have to deal with every knucklehead who went to my school. One weeknight when the bar wasn’t packed, I was stationed by the door and pretended to read a dog-eared copy of Naked Lunch (cut me some slack, Hugo’s was that kind of place in that kind of town), and Valentina showed up with two friends. Her dark, curly hair hung over her eyes. She wore a too-big flannel shirt, the sleeves hiding her hands until she wanted to make a point, then she pointed and waved those hands around like they were on fire. She was short, even in her thick-heeled combat boots, but she had physical presence, gravitas; you knew when she entered or left the room. I checked her ID and made a clever quip about the whimsy of her exaggerated height on her government-issued identification card. She retaliated by snatching my book and chucking it into the street, which was fair. Later, she and I ended up playing pool, awkwardly made out in a dark corner, and exchanged phone numbers. We hung out a few times after that, but more often we’d run into each other as regulars at Hugo’s. I was happy to be the weird guy (“Weird Guy” was what she called me) from the state school who occasionally entered her orbit. My comet-like appearances made me seem more interesting than I was. I graduated from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst with a communications degree and student loans that I would default on twice. She graduated from Amherst College—much more prestigious and expensive than Zoo Mass. Postgraduation, I’d figured our paths would never cross again.

When I returned Valentina’s call, our chat was brief. She wouldn’t tell me what the proposition was over the phone, so I agreed to meet her and her friend Cleo at a restaurant on Bridge Street in Providence that weekend. My car (the same beater I’d had in college) barely made the trip down from Quincy, Massachusetts. It had a standard transmission and when on the highway I’d have to hold the gear shift in fifth or it would pop out into neutral. On the ride back, I gave up and drove 70 in fourth gear. I miss that loyal little car.

A restaurant called the Fish Company overlooked the inky Providence River. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner, the place was more than half-empty on a cloudy but warm Sunday midafternoon. I was fifteen minutes late, but I had no problem finding Valentina and Cleo sitting outside, on the wooden dock patio, away from prying ears. They had an open binder on their table, pages filled with rough sketches boxed within long rectangles. I would learn later that Valentina had storyboarded the entire movie, shot by shot. Next to Cleo a paper grocery bag occupied an empty chair. Upon my approach, Cleo slid the chair closer to her, communicating that I wasn’t to displace the bag. Valentina closed the binder and stashed it in an army-surplus backpack.

She greeted me with “What’s up, Weird Guy?”

Aside from the beanie atop her curly hair, Valentina’s appearance hadn’t changed much at first blush. After a minute of catch-up chatter, it was clear she’d become an adult, or more adult than me, anyway. 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. I got nervous because it appeared that whatever their proposition was must be a serious one. I wasn’t prepared for serious.

Cleo was Valentina’s friend from high school. She had long, red hair, big glasses, and a boisterous, infectious, at-the-edge-of-control laugh. When she wasn’t laughing, there was a blank intensity to her gaze and the memory of her irrepressible laughter seemed an impossible one. Maybe I’m projecting now, all these years later, but she was the kind of person who wore sadness and a type of vulnerability that did not translate into her being a pushover. Far from it. She’d battled and battled hard. But if she wasn’t broken yet, she would be, as the world breaks us all.

While we waited for our food Valentina explained that she and Cleo were making a movie; Valentina as director, Cleo as screenwriter, and both would be acting in the film as well. They had funding from a variety of local investors in addition to a modest grant from Rhode Island. It wasn’t a lot of money, but they would make it work. They planned to begin production in a few months. They had a tight shooting window because one of their locations, an old, condemned school building, was going to be demolished in midsummer.

I was gobsmacked despite knowing Valentina had completed a film-studies minor as an undergraduate. I don’t remember what her major was, but it was a course of study her parents had insisted upon so that she would be, in their eyes, employable. Her mother was a marketing director, and her father owned a local chain of combo car wash/gas stations. Because her parents were footing the entirety of the hefty tuition bill, they had insisted on having a say in what they called their “educational investment.” Valentina was an only child, and when she talked about her parents, even in passing, it was with a crackling, bipolar mix of pride and seething resentment. Regardless of the major in which she’d earned her degree, film was her passion. When we were students, I was more obsessed with indie/underground music than film, though I’d spent enough hours as a lonely, brooding teen watching and rewatching movies on cable TV that I could hold on to the threads of her deeper film discourse by my fingertips. She and I had once attended a screening of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and later at Hugo’s she explained expressionism with the aid of scratchy sketches on bar napkins: the strange, moody, angularly distorted set design represented the interior reality of the story. I remember talking out of my ass, attempting to be smarter than I was by drawing parallels to the performative aspect of punk and art-rock bands from the ’70s and ’80s. To Valentina’s credit, she didn’t tell me I was full of shit and helped connect some of those musical dots with me. It was one of those absurd and perfect bar conversations that young, new friends have, portentously vibrating with perceived and real discovery. I can’t decide if I’m now incapable of such a discussion because I know too much or because life has proven that none of us knows anything.

In response to their making-a-movie reveal, I said, “Wow” and “Sounds amazing” at least a dozen times because I didn’t know what else to say until I worked up the courage to ask the obvious. “So why am I here?”

Valentina said, “Good question. Why is he here, Cleo?” She flailed her arms in the air, overdramatic, hammy. “Are we going to ask him?”

Cleo didn’t smile or laugh at what I thought was a joke. That stare of hers. I can still feel it, crawling over, then under, my skin to knock on my bones; the look of a chess master surveying the board and all the possible moves and outcomes, and knowing no matter what she did, she was going to draw or lose.

She said, “Yeah, I guess we should.”

“Great.” Valentina clapped her hands together once. “So, we want you for one of the roles. One of the most important ones.”

After asking them both multiple times if they were fucking with me, they assured me they were not. I told them I’d never acted before, not even in elementary school, which was mostly true, which means it was a lie. I’d taken a drama class my college sophomore year, and our final exam was a group-written and -performed sketch, neither aspect of which is worth detailing here. Suffice it to say, I did not take any more drama classes.

Valentina said, “That’s not a problem. We’ll get the performance we need out of you.”

“That sounds like a threat.” I laughed. They did not.

My legs twitched, eyes blinked, heart rate spiked, and I had to fight the urge to run. Instead, I curled into myself, picked at my beer-bottle label, which sloughed off in slashed, wet clumps. I said, “Oh, man, I don’t know. You don’t want my ugly mug on a screen.” At this, Valentina rolled her eyes and waved a dismissive hand at my desperate self-deprecation. “And I’d be so nervous about memorizing lines and fumbling through them or sounding like a robot, unless you want me to play a robot, like the Terminator or something, but I’d have to be the fucked-up, failed prototype. The one Skynet wouldn’t send out into the field, and maybe some human or mutant finds me in the trash, turns me on, and all I do is ask them if anyone wants to get a pizza or something. See, I’m already rambling. Is this my audition?”

Cleo laughed. “In a weird way, you’re not that far off.”

“That’s Weird Guy for you,” Valentina said. “Relax. It is a big role but it’s a nonspeaking role. You’ll be on-camera a lot, but you won’t have any lines.”

Even though there was no way...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.7.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Horror
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Adam Cesrae • Adam Nevill • A Head Full of Ghosts • Alma Katsu • bird box • Cabin at the End of the World • Carrie • Chosen Ones • Clown in a Cornfield • Compliance • cosmic horror • Disappearance at Devil’s Rock • experimental film • Final Girl • final girls • Final Girl Support Group • Flicker • Friday 13th • Friday The 13th • gemma files • Get Out • Good Neighbours • Grady Hendrix • Growing Things • horror novels • Horrorstor • Horrorstore • Jordan Peele • Josh Malerman • Kealan Patrick Burke • Malorie • My Best Friend’s Exorcism • Nathan Balingrud • Nightmare on Elm Street • North American Lake Monsters • Paperback From Hell • psychological horror • Sarah Langan • Scream • slasher horror • Sour Candy • Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires • Southern Girl’s Vampire Slaying Club • Survivor Song • The Deep • The Last Final Girl • Theodore Roszak • The Ritual • The Silence • The Stamford Prison Experiment • Tim Lebbon • We Sold Our Souls • wounds
• ISBN-10: 1-80336-430-0 / 1803364300
• ISBN-13: 978-1-80336-430-8 / 9781803364308