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 Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles edited by Ellen Datlow

Blumhouse Books, 2020

ISBN: 9780525565758

Available: paperback, audiobook, Kindle

Final Cuts is a themed collection of horror short stories. In this case, the common thread is the relationship to cinema, and occasionally reality TV.  The stories have original ideas, professionally written, but with ambiguous endings that might not be appealing to readers who prefer closure in a story. The writing quality is strong enough to make it work with these types of stories, though.

These are horror stories, but they are the more cerebral type.  There’s very little hack and slash, the stories usually involve extremely weird things happening to the characters and how they perceive  reality.  Of course, there are exceptions to this, “Snuff in Six Scenes” being a good and very entertaining example.  One can tell that most of these stories were written by skilled veterans of the craft, as the prose flows perfectly, and there is rarely a wasted word.  It strikes a good balance between action and inner thoughts, tending towards the latter.

One potential pitfall to themed anthologies is they can limit the creativity, since a common theme must be followed.  That doesn’t happen here, due to the excellent story ideas.  Some examples of what the reader will encounter:

1. A bunch of little tiny mouths that run around eating people.
2. The filming of an occult ceremony where acting becomes reality for nefarious purposes.
3. A hearing aid used to listen to a theatre movie broadcasts verbiage very different from the film, and it relates to a murder.
4. A select screening of a rare film causes some people to want to get killed.

The stories that are somewhat standard ghostly tales have some new settings that add to the flavor.  For example, one features an online reality show, where an unexplained apparition sometimes appears.  The real fun is the reality show itself, which stars two drunk college girls talking about science, hence the story title, “Drunk Physics.”  Some of the writing formats are unusual as well.  “Cut Frame” is written in interview transcript format, complete with its own invented Wikipedia entries.   “Altered Beast, Altered Me” is written mainly in email form.

Final Cuts features excellent writing and is creatively very strong. While most readers will enjoy this, it might not work for readers who like all story threads to be resolved by the end.  Many stories are open ended, and a few have endings that don’t seem to relate that much to the main story thread. Overall, though, it scores high in the most important areas, originality and quality of writing.

Contains:  violence, profanity

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson