54 pages • 1 hour read
Horror Movie
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Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Now: The Director Part 2”
For the reboot, Marlee is hiring a younger actor to play the teenage version of the Thin Kid. The narrator will replace him after he has put on the mask and completed his transformation. The narrator is initially apprehensive about the age of his body, but agrees because it will get the movie made. She adds that the younger actor, Jacob, will reprise the role at the end of the movie because she fears it wouldn’t be appropriate for the narrator to participate in the final kill scene.
The narrator asks about the budget of the film, leading Marlee to reveal that the studio has committed up to $25 million. This surprises the narrator, though it also assures him that Valentina and Cleo’s vision will be fulfilled. They discuss how Valentina was dissatisfied with a scene they had shot in Karson’s house, where one of the characters’ deaths had been downgraded to a throat-slash as a compromise. Marlee agrees the result was disappointing, especially after she compared the scene uploaded on YouTube to the screenplay. The narrator points out that Valentina’s choice to upload it anyway suggested that she accepted the compromise. They agree that whatever Valentina intended for the film ultimately worked.
In the screenplay, missing posters of the Thin Kid go up around the town. Police investigate the school for clues. Cleo flips the posters in her room to face outward before she leaves the house. Valentina steals a knife from her family kitchen, claiming she is going to Cleo’s. Karson gives his dad the same excuse and asks if he can lend his father’s chainsaw to Cleo’s dad.
Valentina is annoyed that Karson has brought a chainsaw. They visit the abandoned classroom, initially thinking that the Thin Kid has escaped. When he emerges from the supply room, the teens tape the kitchen knife to his right hand. Valentina plays the fortune teller note game with the Thin Kid to tell him about the party. She invites him to follow them. The Thin Kid hesitates, but eventually follows.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Then: Valentina’s House Part 1”
In 2008, Valentina invites the narrator to listen to a new proposition. It has been years since they last spoke at a court trial. Her voice message uncannily recalls the first time she had reached out about Horror Movie.
Valentina lives in her childhood home. The narrator passes by the abandoned school they’d used as a set, which has been converted into condos and apartments. When he arrives at Valentina’s house, he is shocked to learn that she has late-stage pancreatic cancer. She explains how she had pivoted away from film and had even been married at one point. She and the narrator express their shared regrets over the lack of safety on the Horror Movie set. When Valentina goes to the bathroom, the narrator finds an annotated copy of the Horror Movie screenplay on her computer desk.
The narrator tells her he has maintained the mask in pristine condition, but won’t explain why he has held onto it. Valentina explains that she has similarly held onto the footage they shot because she wants to finish making the film. She has cut together everything but the final scene, which she has been unable to revisit. She plans to build renewed interest in Horror Movie by uploading three scenes to YouTube, along with the screenplay and production stills. Her intention is to drive this interest until a Hollywood studio decides to make their own version of the film. She wants the narrator to help by appearing at horror fan conventions and participating in the eventual reboot. With Valentina dead and the narrator becoming the only remaining survivor of the production, he will become the face of the film.
The narrator does not directly accept nor reject her proposal. Instead, he leaves the house and returns to his car in a panic to retrieve the Thin Kid mask.
In the screenplay, the teens lead the Thin Kid, whose latex scales are disintegrating, to the party. They worry that the Thin Kid’s costume will tear off by the time they arrive. Karson laments leaving the chainsaw behind at the school. The Thin Kid leaps into action, attacking the partygoers. The film does not show the first deaths, but only plays the sound of their screams. The next time the camera shows the Thin Kid, he is fully transformed as his hand transmutes the knife into sharp claws. He approaches the three teens. Cleo nearly calls him by name until Valentina stops her. She tries to get them to return to the school as the massacre ends. Karson flees. The Thin Kid throws Valentina aside before pursuing Karson.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Now: The Director Part 3”
The narrator tells Marlee how they shot the house party scene in the original Horror Movie production. He doesn’t tell her how he sunk into the Thin Kid character after losing his finger, making almost no interaction with the other members of the cast and crew. He recalls being admired by the partygoers when he executed the leap stunt, though that illusion was shattered when he landed and realized there were no witnesses other than a lone crewmember. Dan had cautioned him against taking any more risks on set, but the narrator told Dan it was worth it.
Marlee explains her vision, which follows the screenplay verbatim all the way to its 1990s setting. She thinks Cleo’s screenplay is prescient, but admits that she can’t articulate what it means to her, which makes her both uncomfortable and excited about it.
The narrator tells Marlee about his last meeting with Valentina, including her plan to use the film’s material to inspire a reboot. Marlee wonders if the narrator has a copy of the original screenplay because the one that was uploaded online contains future anachronisms that Cleo wouldn’t have known about when she first wrote it. The narrator doesn’t believe that Valentina edited those anachronisms into the script. He withholds the discovery of Valentina’s annotated screenplay for fear that it might cause delays in production. The narrator reassures her that the screenplay has been unchanged since the original production. He even confirms that an unusually long scene set in Karson’s house was shot as written. He is unable to remember much outside the shoot.
Parting ways with Marlee, the narrator reiterates his surprise with the budget. He comments that the creation of the film almost seems predestined.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Then: The Convention Part 2”
The narrator plays coy with the fan who asks to see his missing pinky. The fan offers to pay extra for it, which the narrator indulges. Once the fan gives him the money, the narrator shows him his uninjured left hand. The fan accuses the narrator of cheating him and starts messing up his table. Security arrives and the fan’s friends put everything back in order.
The fan is intent on seeing the narrator’s pinky to validate an online theory that the narrator never experienced the injury on set. Evidence includes the fact that the narrator’s injury was never litigated during the court trial, as well as old photos that show him with all of his fingers intact. The fan insinuates that the narrator is profiting off the mythology of the film.
To disprove the theory, the narrator presents his right hand to the entire room. The missing part of his pinky is filled in with a green foam piece. He removes the piece, then, as a gesture of goodwill, signs a photo for the fan, outlining the various ways he could have lost his pinky to continue engendering online theories. He mockingly ends with the suggestion that he could have cut the pinky off himself after the shoot. Before the fan leaves, the narrator gives him a closer look at the pinky, showing him that the scarred end is the same green as the Thin Kid mask.
In the screenplay, Karson returns home, pursued by the Thin Kid. Unable to enter, he hesitantly approaches his garage door, which opens on its own. Karson retreats from it, accessing his house through the back door. He tries searching for his father, who thinks he has done something wrong.
Karson gets lost in the labyrinth, which is exacerbated by the inconsistent lighting in each room he enters. He hears his father screaming and falling upstairs. Karson expects someone to appear in the dining room archway, but no one appears for several minutes. The scene stretches on for an interminable amount of time in an intentional move to unnerve viewers.
The screenplay describes the viewers’ reactions as the scene plays out, beginning with amusement before turning into frustration. Some viewers may think that something is wrong with the film reel or the tape, even though all signs indicate that the movie is screening normally. Those viewers leave the film with the image stuck in their minds, unresolved. The viewers who remain become curious about the lives of those who have remained with them. They realize the horror that none of these people are ever truly knowable. Five minutes into the scene, the viewer realizes that death is inevitable for Karson, just as it is inevitable for everyone else.
The Thin Kid finally appears, prompting Karson to recite the crocodile poem he was afraid of memorizing as a child. The Thin Kid engulfs Karson’s upper in his mouth and bites. A note allows for the director to compromise with an alternative death scene that fits their budget capabilities.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
The reveal that Valentina has planned for a reboot all along heightens the foreboding mood of the novel. It suggests that everything that has occurred in the present storyline of the novel has been part of an elaborate plan centered around the film’s growing mythology. By showing the role mythology plays in extending the film’s cultural impact, the novel continues to leverage Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality and The Costs of Creating a Cultural Legacy as themes. For instance, Marlee comments on the anachronisms that appear in the uploaded screenplay, insinuating that Valentina must have edited it after Cleo’s death. The narrator acts as though this isn’t the case, however, pushing forward the suggestion that Cleo might have had supernatural access to knowledge from the future. This resonates with the story he tells at the convention, assuring the fans present that the story of his hand injury is real. Privately, he engenders further theories with the fan who challenged him, making the real story of his experience harder to discern.
The mythology that the narrator and Valentina are trying to push forward fosters the sense that the events of the novel, most especially the reboot, are inevitable and impossible to prevent. The narrator expresses this when reflecting upon the reboot’s massive budget, which will allow Marlee to complete Valentina’s aspirations for the film. It’s key to recall that Marlee is a disciple of Valentina’s, but not necessarily Cleo’s. Where Cleo was cautious about the growing risks of the production, Valentina welcomed all efforts to realize it as it was written. Valentina herself is a disciple of filmmaking as an abstract artistic ideal, pursuing it to escape the commercial ambitions that her wealthy parents force upon her. Through the lens of the mythology she is fostering, she and the narrator become archetypal prophets who usher in the fulfillment of the screenplay as though it were a biblical text.
Tremblay pushes this interpretation forward through a surreal moment in the screenplay text, which fills in the time of Karson’s extended death sequence by reflecting on the experience of the viewer. Not only does this section simulate the deflated and restoring tension of Karson’s death, but it also functions as a treatise of horror as a genre, suggesting that it works best when it can resonate with the difficult emotional truths of life, such as death and the unknowability of other people. The fans of the film demonstrate their cult following at the convention, and their affinity for the film, despite never having seen it, functions as an analogue for faith.
In exchange for his participation in Valentina’s plan, the narrator is rewarded with the emotional support that being the Thin Kid grants him, which is symbolized by his continued possession of the mask prop. If the mask emboldened him to live through the suffering he endured on-set, it also emboldens him to face the aimlessness of his days, which only goes to show how long the shadow of Horror Movie stretches over his life. When he engages the fan who challenges him at the convention, he indulges the possibility that he cut off his own finger to profit off the story. The reason he does this is to stress how sad and lonely his life would be if that theory were true. The myth that he lost his finger isn’t just a profitable story, but also a preferable lie. This ultimately recasts the narrator as an unreliable storyteller, pushing forward narratives that support his aims.
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