“Texas Chainsaw. Alfred Hitchcock. And Horror Movie.”
Night Time Logic is the part of a story that is felt but not consciously processed. It is also the name of this interview series here at Cemetery Dance and over on my YouTube channel.
Through in-depth conversation with authors this column explores the night time part of stories, the strange and uncanny in horror and dark fiction, and more.
My short story collection with Cemetery Dance is titled The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales in homage to Aickman and his kind of stories that operate this way. It can be found here.
I spoke with Paul Tremblay in August 2024 about his new novel Horror Movie. Our conversation is available on YouTube.
My conversation with Paul today begins with a question about the main character in Horror Movie….
DANIEL BRAUM: I love stories that play with and balance and use the tension between the psychological and the supernatural. Your work always has an element of that in play.
You’ve done a wonderful job with the new book Horror Movie. It operates really well on different levels. You did an amazing job flowing around back and forth from different points in time in the story and that is no small feat. You make it really look effortless and its perfectly done.
The first thing that stood out to me when reading Horror Movie was the voice of the main character. The Weird Guy / The Thin Kid. We first get him in the present where he is in his 50s looking back at the events of the ill-fated movie from the 1990s.
Tell us about the voice and the character. How much of yourself did you draw on to make that happen?
PAUL TREMBLAY: Thank you! The Thin Kid is heavily my voice, or at least, I wish I could be as cynical and quick-witted as he is. You know the feeling when someone says something to you and you think of the perfect comeback (a decent one, anyway) an hour or a day later? Well, that was The Think Kid when he was dealing with some Hollywood types. Otherwise, he’s no more or less me than any of my other characters. Me, acting on behalf of the Thin Kid, would also like to give a nod to the great Gunnar Hansen and his book Chainsaw Confidential. The Thin Kid’s audio presentation owes a debt to that book.
One of our introductions to the narrator is when he is looking back at his conversation on ’90s music with Valentina, his college friend and the film maker of the ill-fated film. To them, the biggest crime was selling out, which to me raised the theme of authenticity. And was a really smooth way of introducing the notion and theme of “self.”
I read an interview where you mentioned that a lot of your writing process is to “trust in the subconscious.” Was this one of those things that was planned or just surfaced?
For two-thirds of my novels I wrote some form of an outline or plot summary prior to writing page one. With Horror Movie, however, I did not write a summary beforehand. I kept notes as I went and tried to plan a chapter or two ahead at a time, but for the most part, the writing was more free-wheeling.
Regarding the specific detail of Valentina and the Thin Kid discussing selling out, some of that came directly from the time period of early ‘90s. I figured these characters were in a subset of the culture who really worried about the notion of integrity and selling out, to where it was a kind of purity test. That choice, in my mind, led the rest the story, and the movie within the story, by the nose. Er, noses.
Some horror movies from the era the novel is set in that came to mind as I was reading the book were The Crow and The Blair Witch Project.
The Crow because of the tragic loss of Brandon Lee.
And Blair Witch because of the campaign to blur the line between documentary and fiction with the marketing video Curse of the Blair Witch. Also, both movies (for better or for worse) have remakes.
What are your thoughts on these films or any stand out films that may have inspired you while creating the book?
I was and remain a big fan of The Blair Witch Project and have long admired the conceit as well as its execution. That movie felt very part of the ’90s-DIY-we-don’t-need-stars ethos.
When creating Horror Movie (or the movie inside the novel), I wasn’t thinking of specific movies per se, but more my lifelong movie watching experience. During my formative years (ages 5 to 21) whatever nascent knowledge of story (of how it worked and how it didn’t work) I had was almost exclusively gleaned from film and television. In a lot of ways, this book was me honoring my filmic upbringing (is that too obnoxious? Don’t answer), while comparing the different effects/approaches of horror in literature and film.
While I wasn’t thinking of one film, I wanted my movie to be weird, art house, disturbing, and still feature a person in a mask, and a maybe monster.
In the acknowledgement section you tell us that one of the inspirations for the book was author Stephen Graham Jones who directed you to watch a video of Walter Chaw and John Darnielle talking about the film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. One of the things that struck me about that film is how it violates boundaries. Not in the way I expected, however. Instead of gore and depictions of violence, I found notions of safety and what film viewers might think of as safety were the real violations. Going through closed doors. Taking away safe “beats” and spots in a film. Perhaps in that way it is a project that was aware of viewer expectations while still delivering on and meeting expectations as well as subverting them.
I think the same can be said of Horror Movie. How does Horror Movie play with and utilize reader expectations?
All that you said about Chain Saw is true. One of my favorite parts of the movie is the lore and reputation that still reverberates. I know I didn’t watch it for a long time because of its gory rep, when it’s almost bloodless. Blood-sheddingless? Almost. Generations of viewers have false memories of it being gorier than it is, of seeing Leatherface’s saw actually cut into flesh when it’s never showed. It’s a film that activates the viewer’s imagination in a way that I normally associate with reading, if that makes sense.
As far as reader expectations goes for Horror Movie: I wanted the movie to be scary, disturbing, and difficult to predict. But I wanted what happened in real life (if the Thin Kid is to be believed, and I don’t know, he seems pretty trustworthy to me) to be even more horrific.
The notion of a cursed film and a cursed object is one of the aspects of the book. There is a fun back story of the mask that the main character wears.
Due to what you present the reader as never quite sure if it is a cursed object or if something else is in play. Or maybe both things are happening. Is it a cursed object or something else. Or both? I often call this an “intentional ambiguity” or an Aickmanesqe. It is something you do often in your work and I was pleased to see how it found its way into this book. Please tell us about the mask and how it operates psychologically (as in a non-supernatural way) with the characters
I wanted the mask to have a kind of power over the characters, the Thin Kid especially, and hopefully the readers, too. I hoped that some of its power would come from its mysterious origin. Cleo gives us an origin story, but it’s sounds so borderline supernatural, we don’t know if we can believe it. The Thin Kid seems, at times, a bit too eager to play along, too.
I imagined the mask to be somewhere between a slasher’s mask and a rubber monster mask. I describe it, but I don’t give too much detail because I want you the reader to imagine/make your own mask. Like the characters, you won’t know where the mask came from. Other than a few words from me to help you along, your mask will come from you. Hopefully that’s unsettling and in keeping with the goings-on of the novel.
Viewing the mask as an actual true cursed object, the book can be seen as a Monkey’s Paw kind of story. Where the non-human / the object is the center of the story and outlives the characters.
What is the joy of cursed object stories?
One of my characters says something about the curse of a piece of art outliving its creator.
The joy of cursed objects: I like that. I think it speaks to the awe of possibility that attract so many of us to a supernatural horror story. Yeah, the supernatural event or beastie is scary and horrible, but it also means there’s something more to existence that we didn’t know was there before. Similar to the feeling of stumbling across a creepy doll or macabre piece of art, and then you wonder and obsess about who made it and why and how did it get to this spot in time. That you don’t have any ready answers (at least not in the moment of discovery) is the fun part.
A “problem” or perhaps the challenge that sequels or prequels have is how to keep interest and tension given that the reader knows a certain ending or certain thing will happen. An example of where the viewer knows a character will end up in a certain place is the television show called Better Call Saul. We know the character of Jimmy by the end of the show will become Saul and will suffer trauma and loss. Yet the show manages to create tension and interest.
You’ve mentioned that you noticed in your work you often reference and foreshadow event or events that happen 2/3 the way down the line of the story. In a way you intentionally created this challenge for the book. In Horror Movie, the reader knows from the start that the film is doomed and tragic events happen during the filming.
How did this come about? How did you handle the challenge of this in Horror Movie?
I like Hitchcock’s metaphor for suspense; the viewer/reader knows there’s an unexploded bomb under the table, and it will go off eventually. My hope was the reader knowing from the opening chapter that something tragic happened on set would provide built-in suspense with the questions of what happened and to whom and how did it happen? But the winding road that leads to and away from the reveal and the answers to those questions is the horror, ultimately. I guess it was about making everything worse until we got to that worst point.
At one point in the book the characters looking back reference that their film was shot in the Pre-Columbine era, before the epidemic of mass school shootings. This made me think of the Stephen King book Rage. It is a story that King has taken out of print.
The Thin Kid in one of his dialogs muses that darkness is part of the world and thus should be part of art.
Sometimes fiction has an eerie or awful prescience. Are there some things one should or should not bring into art? Are there some things one just does not?
I grew up with so-called adults claiming that heavy metal and D&D and comics and movies were turning people into blood thirsty Satanists. My knee-jerk reaction then and mostly now is that art doesn’t create monsters, it reflects them. I fall on the side of defending art, especially transgressive art. That act of transgression, of questioning mores is fundamental. Cesar Cruz’s line about art comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable sounds like great horror to me. That doesn’t mean individuals can’t draw their own lines on what they might create or what they’ll read or watch. I have my own lines, or things that I won’t write about. But I wouldn’t dream of telling someone else what they can or can’t write about.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PAUL TREMBLAY has won the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and Massachusetts Book awards and is the nationally bestselling author of Horror Movie, The Beast You Are, The Pallbearers Club, Growing Things and Other Stories, Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, and the crime novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland. His novel Cabin at the End of the World was adapted into the Universal Pictures film Knock at the Cabin. He lives outside Boston with his family.
DANIEL BRAUM writes “strange tales” in the tradition of Robert Aickman. His stories, set in locations around the globe, explore the tension between the psychological and supernatural.
His novella The Serpent’s Shadow and short story collection The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales are out now from Cemetery Dance.
More about his books and events can be found here.
