Horror Movie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of abuse, bullying, substance use, graphic violence, illness, suicidal ideation, and death.

The narrator of the novel is an unnamed protagonist, providing the central narrative arc that gives the story its shape. The narrative arc in question traces the narrator’s transformation into the character he plays in the original Horror Movie production, “The Thin Kid.” Given this transformation, it is important to distinguish the two character personas before exploring how and why the narrator chooses to inhabit the Thin Kid’s persona.

The narrator depicts himself as a one-time actor with minimal dramatic experience. After studying communications at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he rotates through a series of temporary employment roles like truck loading and data entry to pay off his burgeoning student debt. He is driven to take on the role of the Thin Kid because of the lack of direction he feels in his life, which makes it difficult for him to escape from the production once it starts putting his life at risk. This challenges the narrator to overcome his meekness and self-consciousness. Throughout the production of Horror Movie, he portrays himself as someone uncomfortable with vulnerability. This possibly stems from the implied abuse he experienced as a child, which he suggests when he reveals that he was bullied at school and that his mother used to force him to smoke cigarettes. The narrator starts to overcome this meekness by inhabiting the Thin Kid role, expanding on the details that are revealed about him in the Horror Movie screenplay.

In Cleo’s screenplay, the Thin Kid is depicted as an outsider, though he is loosely associated with the characters of Valentina, Cleo, and Karson. When the Thin Kid goes missing, his mother immediately calls of each of their parents to ask after him. Similarly, their peers at school offer them their condolences once he is considered missing. The Thin Kid’s motivations for participating in the three teens’ plan are never explicitly revealed, though when he tries to ask Valentina why he has been chosen to fulfill the role he has been given, Valentina tells him that there is no reason. Although the characters of Valentina, Cleo, and Karson are largely based on their real-life personas, it is never revealed whether the Thin Kid’s character is drawn from a similar person they knew growing up.

The narrator sees the Thin Kid as a version of himself that overcomes his personal flaws and weaknesses. Whenever he finds himself confronted with vulnerability, he reminds himself that the Thin Kid has already endured worse abuse in the screenplay. The more he inhabits the role of the Thin Kid, the more the narrator commits to Blurring the Line Between Art and Reality. Consequently, much of his life in the years following the original production is defined by his relationship to Horror Movie. This is signified in his choice to wear only white t-shirts and black jeans as uniform attire and his refusal to let go of the Thin Kid mask prop from the original Horror Movie production. The narrator’s uniform turns him into a blank canvas upon which he can impose the Thin Kid identity.

As the only surviving member of the production in the present storyline of the novel, the narrator holds the power and responsibility of cultivating the mythology surrounding the production. This turns him into an unreliable narrator, embellishing certain stories to challenge fans of the original film. On a metanarrative level, it also casts doubt over the story he is telling, which culminates in the final reveal that he has learned to change his physical form. His admission to killing his successor as the Thin Kid aims to challenge the perception of what really happened and what has been fictionalized in his retelling.