For me, October is a month of contradictions. On the one hand, I bask in the cooler weather and return of the rain, enjoying how each day my afternoon walks offer a changing tableau of color. On the other, even as I collect fallen leaves in my coat pockets and drink hot chocolate at the local orchards, I know that the warmth of the year is waning. The sun sinks below the horizon earlier and earlier, and the rare rays of warmth that peek through the clouds are weak and unsatisfying. October is both a time of celebration and of dread. The death knell of the year. 

Halloween elicits similarly complex emotions as my first and favorite holiday of the “holiday season”. Aesthetically, Halloween gets me. Much like Marnie Piper in Disney’s Halloweentown, I hold a particular fondness for the weird, the creepy, the dark; this is reflected in my home decor and my bookshelves, which, until the last few years, mainly consisted of bulky hardcovers and tattered paperbacks from horror moguls like Stephen King and Clive Barker. But, for all my love of the spooky and creepy, there is a tinge of dread that comes with Halloween. Even with all my love of the thrills and chills of Halloween, there’s one integral part of the season I know will inevitably follow: horror movies. 

Every year I find myself tempted by movies meant to thrill, whether it’s suspenseful blockbusters like Get Out or mini-series like The Stand. Yet it never fails; even silly, made-for-TV monster-of-the-week shows like The X-Files have me curled in the corner of my couch and peeking through my fingers. It’s a conundrum that’s frustrated me for years. After all, I grew up on horror novels, eating books like Pet Sematary and Books of Blood like full-size candy bars on Halloween night. But the moment these tales are adapted to the screen, my brain panics; real fear shoots through my veins. It has made me an unhappy guest at many Halloween gatherings.

The strange dichotomy I harbor for horror made this month’s recommended Book Club pick all the more interesting. Starting with the line, “You could argue– as I have more than enough times, as part of my Film History lecture– that, no matter its actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story,” Gemma Files’ Experimental Film seemed to look at my own relationship with film, fear, and the entire Halloween season and capture it on the page. 

Heralded as “a modern ghost story”, Experimental Film follows a former film teacher, Lois Cairns, freelancing as a film critic in Toronto to provide an income and follow her passion as she raises her autistic son, Clark. While at a screening, she comes across a piece of film shot on rare, explosive silver nitrate stock, potentially belonging to Canada’s first female filmmaker. She dives into researching the elusive Mrs. Whitcomb, but the deeper Lois is pulled into the mystery of the filmmaker, the harder it becomes to back out– and something is close on her heels. Blending mystery, film history, and folklore, Gemma Files crafts a captivating, chilling story born from a love of film and literature.

Files’ interest in film is no passing interest. Before becoming an author, Gemma Files was a Canadian film critic, and the breadth of her knowledge shows. Using the character of Lois as a stand-in, Files takes the reader on a journey supported by her background in the Canadian film scene and the history of the medium. But her expertise doesn’t stop there– by choosing to write about a culture she was immersed in for years, she creates characters that ring incredibly true. From interviewing the jealous rich-kid Wrob to navigating the tenuous or complicated relationships with former colleagues and students, each wrapped up in their own art-scene drama, every character in the limited Toronto film locale felt authentic. This includes Lois herself, with her unreliable narration and complex emotions surrounding raising an autistic son mirroring Files’ own experiences. While some readers have found Lois “grating” or “whiny”, I found Lois to be refreshingly real and flawed. All told, Experimental Film is a prime example of the quality and depth you can bring to a novel when you write what you know. 

Writing within her wheelhouse also allowed Files to experiment with style. By splitting the book into several sections, all labeled for different parts of a movie like “Title Cards” or “Act One”, Files plays with the reader’s expectations of narrative flow. The three-act movie structure is evident in the pacing, but Files lets the prose interplay with the film tropes, using tactics with exposition and narration that would fall flat in theaters but build suspense in novel form. She also plays with explicit foreshadowing, using film-like framing devices, non-linear jumps in time, and subtle language choices in place of visual clues, deepening the mystery at the novel’s heart while still giving it a film-like aesthetic. By juxtaposing the two narrative styles, Files creates an experimental take on modern horror, one that feels fresh without getting too deep in the weeds of either artistic medium. 

As well-written as it was, nothing could stop my general disappointment in the main attraction: horror. I may have a higher tolerance for horror novels than some, but I can still recognize sections meant to invoke fear when I see them. In Experimental Film, I struggled to find many. There were certainly some strange, unexplained events, and Files is great at creating tension, but the entire buildup to the third-act confrontation felt undercooked and spare. By the time I felt one genuine chill up my spine, the book was nearly done, and the rest felt more akin to an action movie than a horror thriller. 

That’s not to say there was no value in finishing the book, though. On the contrary, I found myself wrapped up in the multi-layered mystery all the way through the third act, completely enamored with the tragic life and unexplained disappearance of Mrs. Whitcomb and how parallels between herself and Lois developed throughout the story. Even with the disappointing horror element, I found the journey the Files took us on well worth the price of admission.  So, while I wouldn’t give Experimental Film a hearty recommendation to fellow horror fans, I will point my supernatural mystery-loving friends in its general direction. I think there’s a lot to like in Experimental Film, and, if my expectations had been more measured in the horror department, I may have had a better overall impression of Files’ most personal work. As it is, I’ll be returning the novel to the library and revisiting my bookshelves to get my horror fix this Halloween weekend. Until next month friends: happy reading, happy sipping, and most importantly, happy Halloween!