How Paul Tremblay mined a lifelong love of scary films to craft new novel 'Horror Movie'
For high school math teacher turned author Paul Tremblay, a lifetime of watching scary movies has led to an acclaimed bibliography full of enjoyably creepy horror novels.
So with the title of his latest being “Horror Movie,” you know Tremblay’s not messing around. This spin on the “cursed film” trope centers on an art-house flick made in 1993 by a group of indie filmmakers but never released, outside of a few scenes put online. A fandom has grown around its legend, to the point that it’s being remade, and the only surviving member of the cast – who played a masked teen called “the Thin Kid” – is a producer. Through past and present perspectives, and the script of the film, Tremblay’s book is a slow-burn narrative of creative egos, disturbing circumstances and the tragedy at the heart of the original production.
Tremblay didn’t read for fun until his 20s, “so my very nascent early understanding of story and story structure was all through movies,” says the author, whose 2018 book “The Cabin at the End of the World” was adapted by M. Night Shyamalan into last year’s “Knock at the Cabin.” Writing “Horror Movie” was “getting to break that apart and try to make a horror movie be a part of a book.”
The 52-year-old Tremblay, who’s currently working on the middle-grade horror novel “Another” (coming in 2025), runs down the cinematic chillers that influenced “Horror Movie” and inspired his own writing over the years.
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‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ was the initial ‘Horror Movie’ inspiration
Tremblay’s original impetus for “Horror Movie” came from an online conversation he saw about the 1974 slasher classic that mentioned the 2013 book “Chain Saw Confidential,” Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen’s first-person account of what happened making the movie. “It just sent me down a ‘Chain Saw’ rabbit hole. I read that book and they took so many chances on set, like what would've happened if the chainsaw slipped?” Tremblay says. “Then I just started thinking about the 1970s and the ‘90s, people making an independent movie and something went wrong, and that was just really the start of it.” (A chainsaw also heavily factors into the plot of “Horror Movie.”)
Tremblay mined “that raw, almost desperate energy" of indie horror movies, be it the arty works of A24 – the company known for the likes of “The Witch” and “Hereditary” – or the Dutch film “Borgman,” a “weird, messed-up movie” about a drifter taken in by an upper-class family. “I definitely wanted some of that same messed-upness” in "Horror Movie," he says.
Tremblay surrounded himself with possession films for ‘A Head Full of Ghosts’
When writing one of his books or short stories, Tremblay tries to tailor his entertainment consumption and surroundings to stuff that best serves his project. For 2015’s “A Head Full of Ghosts,” about a possibly possessed teenage girl featured on a reality TV show, Tremblay watched and rewatched “The Exorcist” and others of its ilk.
“I’m usually reading things that I think will sort of inspire ideas, too," he says. "I'm not too worried about the intrusion of other voices. In fact, I enjoy getting unexpected sparks from things.” (A movie version of “A Head Full of Ghosts,” which “scared the living hell” out of Stephen King, is in the works from producer Robert Downey Jr. and “Goodnight Mommy” directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.)
‘The Cabin from the End of the World’ spawned from home invasion movies
Admittedly a “longtime scaredy cat,” Tremblay’s love of horror stemmed from watching 1950s and ‘60s black-and-white movies like “The Killer Shrews” that “would give me nightmares” when he was 7. To this day, he doesn’t like home invasion movies, “partly because they're so icky, they're so scary,” he says, but the ones Tremblay digs – the French film “Them,” “Hush” and the old Audrey Hepburn film “Wait Until Dark” – inspired him to do a book version of one with “The Cabin at the End of the World.”
“It was more messing around with, oh, it'd be really weird if the strangers showed up and started killing each other instead of the family," Tremblay says. "Why would they do that? That was just sort of a little bit of a logic puzzle for me."
‘Knock at the Cabin’ turned into a meta influence for Tremblay’s ‘Horror Movie’
The author visited the set of Shayamalan’s “Cabin” adaptation, which featured a significantly different ending than the book, and the author's experience so far in the movie industry informed the filmmaking bits of “Horror Movie” where the older Thin Kid is dealing with producers and directors to get a movie made. “I have enjoyed it, but it has been weird. It's been super-stressful at times, too,” Tremblay says. “The business side of it still just makes zero sense to me. That's fine, maybe it's not supposed to make sense to me.”
The writer admits some of the “Horror Movie” stuff is from personal stories, others are anecdotal from other authors: “We novelists don't have a union so when weird things happen in Hollywood, our only revenge is to write about it."
