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.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Now: The Producer”
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence, death by suicide, workplace abuse, and self-harm.
The novel is told by an unnamed narrator who worked on an unreleased film entitled Horror Movie. In the 30 years since its production, the film has gained a cult following online, especially after its director, Valentina Rojas, uploads the complete screenplay and several completed scenes to the Internet. A number of film producers reach out to pitch reboot concepts, though none of them are fully committed to a serious project. One of the producers, George, initially gives the narrator the impression that he isn’t important enough to merit a face-to-face meeting. When George schedules a second meeting, the narrator is surprised.
The meeting takes place at a café. The narrator shows up wearing his signature outfit: black jeans and a white t-shirt. After discussing the details of the production, George indicates that a friend of his cousin had worked on the set of Horror Movie. The narrator understands that this is a power play meant to forge a stronger connection between them. The narrator refuses the strategy and challenges George to name the friend. George fails, so the narrator calls him out on his bluff. Given that there were only up to 10 people on the Horror Movie crew, the narrator thinks it disrespects their memory to accept George’s lie.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Then: The First Day”
On June 9, 1993, Valentina gathers the cast and crew of Horror Movie for the first day of production. She gives an impassioned speech that shows off her intelligence before outlining the shooting plan for the day. She intends to shoot the film in chronological order over the next five weeks. At the end of the speech, Valentina declares that “[a] movie is a collection of beautiful lies that somehow add up to being the truth […] But the first spoken line in any movie is not a lie and is always the truest” (7). Screenwriter Cleo Picane distributes the day’s mini-scripts (or “sides”) to the crew. The narrator hadn’t read anything from the screenplay until the night before.
The novel shifts into the text of Cleo’s screenplay for Horror Movie. Four teens walk down a suburban side street. Three of them are thinly veiled avatars for the lead crewmembers on the film—Valentina, Cleo, and Karson. The fourth teen, the Thin Kid (the role played by the narrator), is implied to be an outsider, always presented out of focus and apart from the other three. Nevertheless, the teens beckon the Thin Kid to follow them to an undisclosed location in the forest.
Karson worries that there will be other people at their destination. Cleo suggests frightening them off with the object she is carrying in a paper bag. The Thin Kid asks a question beginning with “Why am I—,” but Valentina cuts him off, answering sincerely, “There’s no ‘why’ […] there never is” (15).
Chapter 3 Summary: “Then: The Pitch Part 1”
Two months before the start of the shoot, Valentina invites the narrator to hear her proposition. Valentina and the narrator met when they were college students in Amherst. The narrator worked as a busser at the bar that Valentina used to frequent with her friends. After a brief but awkward romantic encounter, the narrator and Valentina occasionally hung out as friends, Valentina giving the narrator the moniker “Weird Guy.”
The narrator accepts Valentina’s invitation and meets her and Cleo at a restaurant in Providence. Cleo and Valentina are friends from high school. When the narrator sees them, he realizes that they are about to pitch him something serious, which makes him nervous. Cleo and Valentina share their plans to make a horror movie on a modest budget, funded by local investors. The narrator connects this to Valentina’s passion for filmmaking, which brushes against her wealthy parents’ aspirations for her to pursue a lucrative commercial career.
Valentina and Cleo offer the narrator an important part in their movie, the role of the Thin Kid. The narrator is reluctant to take the role, citing his lack of acting skills and his ugliness. Valentina reassures him that the role is non-speaking despite its prominence in the film. The narrator feels drawn to accept because of the attention he is getting from Cleo, which makes him feel like he could reinvent himself. Valentina and Cleo clarify that they are choosing him because his tall height and lanky build match their vision for the character. The narrator is self-conscious because of his experience being bullied in school for his body. On the other hand, this helps him to connect with the role he is being offered.
Valentina asks the narrator if he can take time out of work to join the production. The narrator has recently moved out of his childhood home following the separation of his parents. To pay for his rent, he works at a temp agency, doing jobs like loading trucks, picking grocery store orders, and entering data. Dissatisfied with the high effort and the low pay of his jobs, the narrator offers to withdraw from the agency so he can work on the film full-time.
Valentina discloses that they had auditioned other actors to play the Thin Kid, but parted ways with the one they hired because he kept undermining Valentina and Cleo for being women. Valentina and Cleo admit that the screenplay is unorthodox, but they assert their confidence in their vision, having spent the last two years developing it. Valentina wants to give the narrator the screenplay in piecemeal, allowing him to absorb the narrative in real time the way the Thin Kid does. The narrator hesitantly agrees to the plan. After learning that the film will be called Horror Movie, the narrator asks to see what Cleo is keeping in the paper bag next to her.
The novel cuts back to the screenplay, finding the four teens at the edge of an abandoned school. Valentina and Cleo pretend that they previously attended the school, making up stories about their monstrous teachers. Karson joins their game, telling a story about lying to a teacher so that he could get out of memorizing a poem for class. He explains that the reason he avoided the assignment was that the poem made him afraid of crocodiles. He muses that the crocodile from the poem lives in the school.
The teens find a dilapidated classroom on the second floor. The teens work together to move a pile of desks away from the supply room door. Cleo is the only one who doesn’t help, preoccupied with reading the writing on the chalkboard. The three teens urge the Thin Kid to sit on the one desk they leave in front of the supply room. Cleo removes a mask from her paper bag and gives it to Valentina, who places it on the Thin Kid’s head. The mask is of a monster’s head, though its features keep shifting from Gill-man to snout monster to gargoyle the longer the viewer looks at it. The screenplay suggests that the mask is alluring to look at because it reflects its viewer.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Then: The Pitch Part 2”
Cleo shows the narrator the mask that he will be wearing in the movie. The narrator is underwhelmed by its cheapness and absurdity, though he does not voice this to the filmmakers.
Cleo reveals that she had acquired the mask under strange circumstances. When she, Valentina, and Karson were growing up in Rhode Island, they used to hang out at the derelict McKay Elementary School, which was closed after economic changes forced a decline in the town population. Cleo would occasionally spend time in the school alone to practice her writing skills. Earlier that year, Cleo had revisited the school to seek inspiration. In one of the classrooms, she found a pile of student desks, under which she found a head. The head appeared to blink at Cleo, scaring her away. She later wrote the first draft of her screenplay and shared what had happened with Valentina.
Curious to learn what she had really seen, Cleo returned to the school and found that it wasn’t a head, but a mask stretched onto an abstract foam head. Cleo wrote the first line of her screenplay into the dust on the floor as an offering to take the mask home with her. When she and Valentina returned the following month, the line had been erased.
The narrator is incredulous, unsure if they have fictionalized a scene from the screenplay as the real mask’s origin story. Valentina indicates that they have deliberately chosen not to explain the mask’s origins in the film. The narrator insinuates that they are telling him a “cursed-mask” story to influence his attitude toward it and consequently his performance. The filmmakers point out that they never said it was cursed. The narrator nevertheless insists that it must’ve been cursed to make it a lost object in the first place. Cleo suggests that the mask wasn’t lost, but purposefully left behind.
Years later, the narrator is unable to find a faithful copy of Cleo’s mask.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The novel begins by introducing its alternating structure, which finds the narrator in two timelines: the present and the past. Of the two, the past storyline bears the weight of narrative responsibility. Everything that happens in the present storyline alludes to what happened back then, meaning that the present is offered as a consequence or an outcome of the past. This structure allows Tremblay to allude to certain outcomes while keeping fundamental details about the past shrouded in mystery.
The novel reveals early on, for instance, that the film Horror Movie has gained cultural relevance because Valentina uploads pieces of the film to the Internet. Her reasons for doing this, however, are still unclear, foreshadowing later moments of exposition. This decision already starts to hint at The Costs of Creating a Cultural Legacy. Once the novel introduces Valentina, the novel starts to suggest her motivations and what will lead her to the moment she decides to upload the film. The past storyline is therefore not just a “backstory” for the present but a narrative that will drive and escalate the present storyline’s stakes.
Apart from the two main storylines, the novel introduces a narrative conceit in the form of the Horror Movie screenplay. The screenplay is the first sign that Tremblay is Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality in the novel. All of the characters, except for the Thin Kid, present identical representations of the characters who are making the film. Because the novel barely shows Valentina, Cleo, and Karson, it projects the characteristics gleaned from their screenplay avatars onto their “real-world” characters.
The Thin Kid is set apart from this group to establish the narrator’s character arc. Although the narrative never reveals his name, the narrator maintains a level of abstraction that makes his character initially difficult to grasp. The novel presents character details like the narrator’s family life, his education, and his work, but these details have little to no bearing on his behavior during the film, much less the larger narrative. The only exception to this is his body, which was the reason he was bullied in school and subsequently the reason he was chosen to play the Thin Kid. The narrator thus becomes a blank canvas onto which the narrative starts to project the persona of the Thin Kid. The narrator alludes to this function himself when he suggests that he wants to take on the role to reinvent himself and become someone worthy of attention. At the same time, the most defining character choice he makes in these early chapters is one of reluctance. He hesitates over accepting the role, which will keep recurring as he reaches major turning points in the story. By shirking the responsibility of his choice and behaving as though Valentina and Cleo had strong-armed him into joining the film, the narrator makes it appear as though he isn’t in control of his own narrative.
The novel presents the screenplay in a way that mimics the narrator’s experience. Valentina wants the narrator to read the script in piecemeal, rather than reading the entire text before shooting begins. The narrative gives similar partial glimpses of scenes, most of which align with what is happening in the real world. This, along with the book sharing its title with the film being made—which is in itself an allusion to the genre they are engaging—underlines the metafictional qualities of the novel.
