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Book: How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive
Author: Craig DiLouie
Pages: 320
Source: NetGalley
Publisher: Redhook
Genre: Horror
Publication Date: June 18, 2024
Summary:
Horror isn’t horror unless it’s real.
Max Maury should be on top of the world. He’s a famous horror director. Actors love him. Hollywood needs him. He’s making money hand over fist. But it’s the 80s, and he’s directing cheap slashers for audiences who only crave more blood, not real art. Not real horror. And Max’s slimy producer refuses to fund any of his new ideas.
Sally Priest dreams of being the Final Girl. She knows she’s got what it takes to score the lead role, even if she’s only been cast in small parts so far. When Sally meets Max at his latest wrap party, she sets out to impress him and prove her scream queen prowess.
But when Max discovers an old camera that filmed a very real Hollywood horror, he knows that he has to use this camera for his next movie. The only problem is that it came with a cryptic warning and sometimes wails.
By the time Max discovers the true evil lying within, he’s already dead set on finishing the scariest movie ever put to film, and like it or not, it’s Sally’s time to shine as the Final Girl.
My Review:
I was given a free advanced reader copy of How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive by Craig DiLouie by Redhook via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you, Redhook!
Max Maury is a hot up-and-coming horror movie director with the conclusion of his debut movie trilogy fresh off the press. In the Hollywood horror scene of the 1980’s, he is the next big thing in slasher horror, and everyone wants a piece of the action. He’s made the leading actor and actress of these movies rich and famous, and they’re thirsty for more. Other would-be actors are practically throwing themselves at him, begging him to put them in his next film.
Max, though, is disappointed in himself. After he hears people in the audience laughing instead of gasping during his latest movie’s premiere, he feels like he’s failed as a horror director. He feels like he’s sold out to his sleezy producer, like he’s only in it for the money instead of creating real horror. At the premiere after party, Max wanders off to escape the praise he doesn’t feel he deserves, which is where he stumbles upon a copy of a film that shouldn’t exist. It’s a horror movie that ended in the deaths of all but three crew members, and through a series of coincidences, Max ends up with the camera used to film it.
The view of this film coincides with Max meeting Sally Priest, a bit actress with ambitions of being cast as the next Final Girl. She inspires him to film the most realistic, best horror movie ever made. Max decides the best way to do that is with his new camera, and he wants to make Sally Priest the star. However, the camera is more than it seems, and the cost of using it could be more than Max or Sally are able to pay.
This is probably obvious from the description of the story, but How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive’s plot was pretty meta. The entire story is about the filming of a horror movie and all the steps that going into movie-making in general. It also refers to and abides by the “rules of horror,” such as having a Bad Girl, a Final Girl, etc. The true story isn’t about horror movies or making them, though. It’s about the horror story of the cursed film camera and a director willing to do anything to make his dream come true.
Max and Sally, along with various other people throughout the story, become characters in the very movie their filming. It’s a story within a story, of sorts, and for the most part it works. Unfortunately, abiding by such a predictable story structure made every twist and turn the story took very predictable. I won’t go into spoilers here, but let’s just say, even though some of the horror rules were subverted, the results were still easy to anticipate. I did find the story suspenseful at times, but this predictability made it a slow read, which is difficult to accomplish in a novel barely over 300 pages.
Additionally, I feel like movie buffs or cinephiles may get more out of reading this books than I did. The parts of the story focusing on Max’s point of view often include a lot of technical terminology and movie-related jargon that, to me, wasn’t really necessary. It felt like a lot of this internal dialogue about how movies get made was just there to pad out the story instead of moving the plot forward. I enjoy watching movies, and I mostly understood what was being described. I just didn’t care about it in relation to the plot.
Finally, I just didn’t find this book very scary at all. Sure, it’s a thought-provoking premise. A director uses a cursed film camera to create a real horror movie because the camera kills people. There are some graphic descriptions of some of the deaths, but I’ve never found blood and gore to be scary – it’s just gross. I feel like DiLouie leaned a bit too hard into the horror movie creation process rather than writing a horror story.
My Rating:
I gave How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive by Craig DiLouie three out of five stars. The book was well written, and DiLouie obviously did his research regarding how movies are made. However, I found the story predictable, and there was a lot of info-dumping via character internal monologue that did little to characterize or move the plot forward. I definitely found his previous novel, Episode Thirteen, much more suspenseful and scary. I wish he would’ve used more of the psychological horror from that book in this one (you can read my review of Episode Thirteen here). In the end, this book just felt like a gimmick.
Have you read anything by Craig DiLouie? What kind of horror books do you enjoy reading? Let me know in the comments below!
Tea Rex Reads 