Killer Book Club (Netflix, 2023)
Killer Book Club (or: El club de los lectores criminales) is a pretty clever and at times genuinely scary Spanish horror movie about a group of horror loving friends who are being haunted by an actual killer clown.
There are eight of them: the emo, the librarian, the influencer, the crazy one, the bitch, the barbie, the hero, the loser. They all go to the same university, they have their own book club and they all love horror stories. And they share an obsession with killer clowns.
When one of their professors not only professes his distaste for the genre, but also sexually harasses student Angela (Veki Velilla, excellent), they decide to get revenge by playing a practical clown joke on him.
When the joke becomes a little too realistic and things go horribly wrong, they know they should go to the proper authorities, but instead they decide to keep it a secret.
Soon, an anonymous writer starts writing a horror novel based on their exploits and every time a new chapter comes online one of them will die.
And so their fight for survival begins in earnest, while they also have to figure out who the killer clown is.
It’s a pretty standard concept for a horror movie, with characters getting picked off one at a time, as a punishment for their sins.
Still, director Carlos Alonso Ojea gets quite a lot of mileage out of the script written by Carlos Garcia Miranda. As other movies (the It-movies come to mind) have shown, there’s something fundamentally scary about clowns and Ojea conjures up some pretty terrifying scenes in the process.
The young actors in the cast are definitely game and before the movie is over most of them get their chance to shine.
Their professor would probably say that the movie proves his point by not being original enough, but Killer Book Club is a pretty clever variation on the Scream-movies.
From the outset there is doubt who can be trusted. Angela herself has a pretty spotty past. As a child prodigy she wrote a successful book but then for the next six years she suffered from writers block. So is she our prime suspect? Or is it one of the guys who vie for her attention? And what does (real life) serial killer clown John W. Gacy have to do with everything?
Killer Book Club keeps you guessing long enough. It is an at times genuinely scary (and sometimes silly) movie that will satisfy most genre fans.