Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI by Jonathan Raab review

    CAMP GHOUL MOUNTAIN PART VI by Jonathan Raab is pretty much a book made just for me. It is a book that celebrates slasher movies, the creators of them, conspiracy theories, UFOs, black magic cults, behind-the-scenes books, and the goofy world of B-movie cinema. If it sounds like a lot, it is. It is also utterly fantastic once you get into the strange weird groove that Jonathan Raab generates as he tells the story of a fictional movie franchise, its production staff, and the bizarre events surrounding both that never happened.

    The premise is that Jonathan Raab, the actual author, has been hired to do a novelization of Camp Ghoul Mountain part VI. The Camp Ghoul Mountain series is a transparent riff on the Friday the 13th series where an animal-masked serial killer murders teens in a mountain summer camp. The book is thus divided in telling the story of the slasher movie franchise's most infamous entry as well as giving a bizarre backstory about its troubled production history.

    The more you love slasher movies, the more you'll enjoy the bizarre crypto-history that Jonathan Raab has woven around the fictional movie. In real life, movies like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, and a few other films deviated from their formulas to introduce bizarre new elements.These include introducing a cult to control Michael Meyers, an imposter Jason Voorhees, and entirely ditching the franchise formula as a whole.

    In this universe, a mushroom-addicted auteur director is given control of a well-established derivative slasher movie franchise to tell his own bizarre story about Satanism in America's government as well as counter-culture protests against the Vietnam war. The production company is left with a movie they don't understand and can't sell that ends up becoming a cult classic despite itself. The movie gains notoriety for all drawing down the wrath of the moral guardians who unwittingly provide it all the publicity it needs to escape its bizarre plot as well as nonsensical twists.

    In addition to the behind-the-scenes, we also get the actual plot of the movie that is a surprisingly well-written slasher. A bunch of campers are horny and wanting to enjoy each other's company on the supposedly haunted mountain. However, Henry the Horror is not the only thing stalking him. He's aided by a cult that has sinister designs on them all and may be the people controlling the monster.

    The book has a humorous conversational style as Jonathan Raab makes very believable characters out of the staff who produced the movies, even when they're acting utterly insane. You sympathize with both the director who wanted to make genuine art out of a horror movie that satirized America in the Eighties as well as the producer who just wanted to put out another nudity-filled gorefest to entertain its teenage audience.

    There's a lot of bizarre and amusing diversions like the discussion of the role that UFOs played in the production of the movie, the slow mental breakdown of certain staff due to the changing politics of the time, and the role of drugs in virtually every decision made by the cast. The annotations are almost as good as the articles themselves as Jonathan Raab struggles to talk about how deep and well-written the Camp Ghoul Mountain series is despite the fact he's conceived of it as objectively one of the stupidest movie series of all time. It's a wink and a nudge at the banality of strictly formula slasher films that the vast majority of fans want.

    A strong recommendation for this novel. I'd actually watch Camp Ghoul Mountain Part VI and I enjoyed reading about it more. I've been a lifelong slasher fan and it's nice to see something that celebrates both the good as well as bad in the genre. Since I'm a fan of documentaries like Never Sleep Again and Crystal Lake Memories, I got extra joy about this. I also got an extra bit of an enjoyment from the fact its basically what would happen if you got John Milinus to direct a slasher flick.

Available here