Book Review: How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive by Craig DiLouie

Summertime reading means different things to different people. For me, it means I pick up books that are meant to be ‘fun’, and the fake blood dripping down the cover of this book shouted ‘fun in a different way’ at me. How to Make a Horror Movie and Survive by Craig DiLouie also incorporates a cursory look at Hollywood in the 1980s in all its shallow glory which is also entertaining to read about. Plus, this book is written by a Calgary author, and I love to read local whenever possible. I also really enjoyed/was terrified by DiLouie’s last book, which you can find my review of here, so there’s lots going for this campy work of horror.

Plot Summary

Max Maury is a famous director of horror movies in the mid 1980s, right when the slasher movie is reaching its peak. He’s sought after by many, living in a giant house with his little dog, speeding around town in his sports car, and attending all the right parties (albeit sullenly). From the outside he’s got it all, but he’s still upset about the screening of his last film which ended in laughter from the audience. He wants to really scare people, not entertain them. Unknown actress Sally Priest meets Max at a film release party, and they find themselves in a deep conversation about the true point of horror. Sally offers some thoughtful observations, but what she really wants is to star in one of his movies as ‘The Final Girl’ so she can finally make her big break into acting. When Max finds a camera with a horrific history at an estate sale, he decides he’s going to use it to film his next movie, hoping it’s haunted past will help infuse his film with true horror. But when he takes the camera out for a test shot, two people in the viewfinder end up dying right in front of Max’s eyes, and he realizes that the camera itself is the murder weapon. He tries to bury it in his backyard, but it calls out to him, and Max can’t ignore it’s voice. Alternating between Max and Sally’s perspectives, the novel examines the tropes of horror movies as the characters move through them, filming their own horror movie to end all horror movies.

My Thoughts

There is lots of blood and gore in this book, but it’s not a dark kind of violence that happens in the shadows. Instead, it’s out in the open, caught on film in sunny California, packaged into entertainment before the sadness of what just happened can really hit; it’s campy. Dictionary.com defines the word camp as: “something that provides irreverent or knowing amusement, as by virtue of its being theatrically stylized and extravagantly artificial, self-consciously artless, or ironically ingenuous” and that’s an accurate description for this story. DiLouie is playing up the artificiality of Hollywood and those who are in it to distract us from the horror of what’s on the page. When one is on a journey to create the best horror film of all time, who cares if a few people have to die along the way? And it’s not just human sacrifices; morals, idealistic values and self respect also get lost in the machine of Hollywood. The situations Sally finds herself in as a young attractive woman trying to get a break in Hollywood are not surprising, but as this is set decades before the MeToo movement, responses to the unfair treatment are much different. Much is lost along the way to achieving status for the characters in this book.

Fans of Grady Hendrix will enjoy this book, because like Hendrix, DiLouie dives into the absurd but can still keep the storyline going, and the reader interested. And as I noted in this review of one of his books, humour and horror can tie very well together, and it doesn’t take much to tip one genre into the other. It’s people’s laughter that spurs Max into trying to make a movie that would be too scary to laugh at, but is that really a worthy goal? Many of us laugh when we are nervous, and the final screening at the end of this book puts that notion to rest forever.

Books that sift through the tropes of horror are becoming much more common, and my reviews of these Stephen Graham Jones books reflect this; he has also written a few books about ‘the final girl‘, but that series, and his writing in general is much darker than this. His novels do become absurd, but not in a funny way, so I’m not sure there is much crossover between the two authors. However, if you’re a die-hard horror fan, you might feel differently. One of the reasons this book feels lighter is that it firmly crosses into the supernatural, even featuring a few talking dead people, so one can’t remain too serious when a corpse is speechifying. I’m not sure if I’ve successfully convinced anyone to think of this as a ‘fun summer read’ but it was a page turner for me, nonetheless.