Nostalgia in Horror, Horror in Nostalgia
Horror Movie. Paul Tremblay. 2024.
At this point I’ve read most of Paul Tremblay’s books. I don’t know that I’d recommend him to someone who doesn’t like horror, but if you do he’s as good as it gets. I think that he’s what I want Stephen King to be. He synthesizes the two titans of 20th century American horror, Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft, in a way that feels natural and organic. He takes young people seriously but is never sentimental about them, and never forgets that the perspective of youth is an important but temporary one, necessarily. He’s a teacher, and I think you can tell when you read his kids: he really likes them, clearly, but he doesn’t get squeamish about them. He doesn’t spare them. His books are often about kids, but never for them. He’s very, very good.
This was a surprising book for him to write; with a few exceptions he’s mostly unconcerned with deconstructing horror or exploring it on a meta level. Honestly, thank god for that: there are a lot of horror writers I love who nevertheless kind of disappear up their own asses sometimes. I’m not interested in reading horror novels about horror fans, and it seems like there are so many these days. So this book surprised me, because even more than Head Full of Ghosts, this one is all about horror fans and why they’re fans and what that fandom can lead to. But, typical Tremblay, it’s not sentimental. Horror fandom is something monstrous in this, fully complicit with a Hollywood system that eats originality and never creates anything new.
What’s especially fascinating about Horror Movie is the way it seems to interrogate whether originality is even possible in horror, or whether that’s even desirable. It’s a genre that’s so closely tied to nostalgia and memory, dependent on associations and archetypes. We find things horrifying not when they are completely alien, but when they show the alien in the very familiar. You need familiarity in order for it to work at all. Horror fans love tropes, love noticing patterns and cliches; they like remixing and rehashing what they’ve already seen. Ghost stories work because you more or less know what to expect from them, so you get satisfaction from having your specific desires met (which you already had defined, before this story started) or from having them subverted. But even subversion requires an initial familiarity, an initial pattern to hold to before it gets broken.
Horror fans know this and like the genre more for it, I think. It’s cathartic; experiencing strong and frightening emotions in a context where things are defined and bounded for you, even if only by the work being defined as fictional and therefore harmless. Horror Movie is partly about that; it’s about reworking something horrific, over and over, until it becomes definable. Tremblay portrays the tragedy, and the truer horror in this process. The past can’t come back; you’ll never be young again once you’re old, and you can’t undo past mistakes. All of the characters in Horror Movie are in the business of telling and retelling the same story, even before they know that’s what they’re doing. The original film they make is already a rehashing of its writer’s barely spoken anxieties and preoccupations. It’s monster is inspired by her own closed school and a mask that came from somewhere, recognizable but alien. All of the actors play younger versions of themselves, and then play younger versions of themselves playing younger versions of themselves.
Maybe all nostalgia, and all horror, is this: looking backward so much you can no longer see the present, trying so hard to make sense of the past and past work you ruin it and yourself, forever. Horror Movie is, even more than a book about being a horror fan, a book about being a writer, and again I prefer Tremblay’s take on the horror of writing more than King’s. It’s this that makes the book ultimately so sad. It’s a story about the failure of rewriting; it’s about characters who fail to realize that once something is made and in the world, it’s sometimes simply too late. I had the thought recently that the most optimistic, hopeful words in our language are “It’s not too late.” Maybe there’s nothing more frightening than the realization that indeed, it might be.
I recommend this novel, as I recommend all Tremblay. I think Cabin at the End of the World is still my favorite of his, though isn’t it interesting it’s the one that’s been made into a film. Isn’t it even more interesting that the film version, directed by horror’s most prominent sentimentalist, M. Night Shyamalan, is notably less bleak and more obviously life-affirming. I won’t go so far as to say that Horror Movie, so concerned with the process of adaptation, is Tremblay’s “fuck you, M. Night” statement. But I’m not not saying that.