Experimental film

This very much falls into the interesting idea/disappointing execution bucket.

In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person's dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

I think herein lies the contradiction at the heart of the novel. Experimental Film is not a film but a book. Consequently, the experience is less like dreaming another person's dream and more like listening to another person explain their dream to you, an experience which tends to be less haunting than it is tedious.

There's definitely an interesting idea here, something like an analog version of The Ring with an Old World god at its center.

The real weakness for me was the narrative style, which is clogged with references.

So, a moment of confrontation is filtered through a reference to a Larry Cohen interview, complete with a handful of notable films he created. A tense moment of silence is compared to a John Cage composition. Near the climax, the protagonist describes their predicament as “if Quentin Tarantino-directed a supernatural giallo or a Guillermo del Toro sitcom with a CanCon twist.”

Sure, it's clever, but it falls into that all-too-common pitfall of postmodern horror: a feeling of alienation from the text, from the characters, from the menacing forces driving the story. By the end, I was skimming and hoping for a really brutal ending because I wanted something to shock me into caring.