Hailey Piper’s Cosmic Horror: This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want

Hailey Piper on the cursed film that waits until you are comfortable, then strikes.

Hailey Piper’s Cosmic Horror: This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want | Interview

Val McQueen has spent thirty years insisting the day she lost her sister and her best friend at a movie theatre in November 1994 is a story she tells badly, not a wound she carries. Then a stranger’s murder drags it back into the light, and Hailey Piper’s This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want turns a missing persons case into a hunt for a film that may not exist outside the people it has consumed. Titan Books releases the novel on 15 September 2026, starred by Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, blurbed by Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones and John Langan, all circling one word: cursed. 

It is Piper’s second trip into Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow territory, after A Game in Yellow put the play on the page last year. Piper’s cosmic horror, from Queen of Teeth to The Worm and His Kings to All the Hearts You Eat, started by accident and now happens on purpose. 

This novel asks what a story does to the people who survive knowing it. Piper agreed to talk about the film that should not exist, the Toad Man who does, and thirty years of refusing to let go.

This is not a monster that warns you the way a brightly coloured frog warns a predator. Piper’s cursed film waits until you are comfortable, then moves in behind you. Covering your ears and singing to yourself never made the horror go away; it only meant Val could not hear the Toad Man coming.

Hailey Piper’s Cosmic Horror: This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want

You’ve described this novel elsewhere as starting from a 1990s disappearance investigated thirty years later. At what point in development did the cursed film stop being the mechanism of the mystery and become a character with its own hunger?

The hunger always came first. Everything started with my 2020 short story “Toad Man, Toad Man,” and I was content to leave it at that, no divulging of answers, only questions. But the story wouldn’t leave my brain alone, and I started thinking about what might’ve happened after the ending, of what effect being the sole survivor of a movie, something that should never be able to hurt you, might look like for the girl who got away.

Val is a tattoo artist in her forties, estranged from parents who blame her for her sister’s disappearance, and she enlists a cinephile former classmate, Roxie de la Fontaine, to help track the film down. What made you choose an amateur investigation built on friendship and film expertise over the police procedural machinery this kind of case could easily have supported?

A couple of detectives show up early in the story, and they have all the opportunity in the world to take Val’s story seriously and start investigating this themselves. Instead, they act like she’s hiding something and crack jokes about her description of the suspect.

If the book were a procedural, that’s where the story would end, and we’d never find out anything. It had to be a mystery couched in Roxie’s media investigation because to write those detectives doing it would have been a lie, and that won’t do when horror is the most honest genre. Also on a craft level, I think the frequent falling back on cop protagonists for mysteries gets boring, just doing it because that’s what’s become standard since Dragnet, rather than trying other options.

In the novel, Val is hounded for thirty years by true crime enthusiasts convinced they already know what happened to her sister. What problem were you trying to solve by making that culture of obsession as much a threat to Val as the Toad Man himself?

It’s less about solving a problem than acknowledging one. You can find statements online from family members of murder victims who say that people’s refusal to leave them alone has made healing and moving on harder. Obviously this is not all true crime enthusiasts, but with the ones in This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want, they’re not much different from the disbelieving detectives, or Val’s parents, confident they’re going to catch some slip-up that cracks open the “real” story of what happened in 1994. What a difference it might’ve made if anyone actually believed Val. 

Paul Tremblay says this book carries more than a hint of King in Yellow, which makes it at least your second novel built around a piece of cursed media that consumes anyone who finishes it, after A Game in Yellow put Chambers’ play itself on the page. What does a cursed film let you do that a cursed play could not?

The King in Yellow is a very specific piece, and we know some of what it does as far as inducing madness and causing erratic behavior. While there are disappearances in A Game in Yellow, there’s no real mystery to why they happen. Characters know that cursed play is bad news and they mess around with it anyway.

The cursed movie is different in that it lulls you into a false sense of security. You just came out to have a good time. The King in Yellow is a poisonous frog, all brightly colored to warn you against eating it, whereas “Blood-Curse of the Toad Man” is like some guy setting up a distraction so he can sneak up behind you when you least expect it.

The title promises a story that refuses the ending its characters, and by extension its readers, want. Was there ever a draft that gave Val the ending we wanted, and what convinced you to take it away from her?

There was only ever going to be one survivor getting out of that theater in 1994. There’s a hint of it in the cursed movie itself, when one character wounds another to make escape possible. Unfortunately Val was always going to carry this weight.

Early work like The Worm and His Kings sent characters into a literal underground beneath New York, while this novel sends Val underground into a film archive and thirty years of buried memory instead. How has the shape of what your characters are searching for changed as your own preoccupations have shifted?

The main difference is that in The Worm and His Kings, despite all evidence to the contrary, Monique is absolutely certain that Donna is alive and can be found. In This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want, even though Val’s parents in the 1990s look at her sister’s disappearance as just that, a disappearance, by the time we catch up with adult Val in 2024, she’s certain her sister and friend are both gone forever. There’s nothing left to do but seek out the movie they were watching and the man who was in that theater with them.

All the Hearts You Eat rebuilt the vampire novel around Ivory Sloan and Cabrina Brite and a town split between Cape Morning and Cape Shadow. What did writing that book teach you about withholding explanation that you carried directly into how much of the cursed film’s origin you were willing to show here?

I think they’re two different approaches with different reasons. In All the Hearts You Eat, while we understand why the vampires retreated to Cape Shadow long ago, we don’t get into that place’s nature or the different cave openings or exactly what the vampires were doing before their hibernation because it would’ve meant too many tangents. Which is too bad, because the vampires’ past is pretty unusual.

Maybe I’ll have to write that as a short story or something in the future. But with This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want, unreliability is key. Val has gone so many years hearing that she’s wrong about what she experienced that some part of her is almost convinced she invented her story. Roxie is looking for concrete facts because she knows the work that goes into making a movie, the hundreds and sometimes thousands of human beings it takes to make that art possible, so that same unreliability haunts her, doubting Val’s story even though Roxie wants to believe.

You’ve spoken about A Game in Yellow as the first time your cosmic horror was intentional rather than something that crept in sideways. Now that intention is a working method rather than a discovery, has it changed how early in drafting you let the cosmic element show its hand?

The Worm and His Kings was the first time, and A Game in Yellow was the second. Every time between those, the cosmic horror snuck in, to the point that I didn’t even realize A Light Most Hateful was cosmic horror at all until after it released and readers started calling it that. And I wish I could say there was more intention now, but honestly, it still sneaks up on me. Even with this book.

But it’s less a situation of “oh, I will write it as cosmic horror now,” and more of realizing that what I’ve already planned is cosmic horror by its nature. So I guess what’s changed is that I’m noticing it before it gets out the door. Progress!

Beyond the authors you have already named as favourites this year, is there an older piece of cursed media fiction, film or otherwise, that you kept returning to while you were building the mythology of the Toad Man?

I didn’t really keep going back to anything because I wanted to build my own situation. For example, while The Ring is definitely an influence, I treated it more as a contrast. It’s the best at what it did, so I wanted to do something entirely separate. But if we’re talking older cursed media fiction, I did stumble upon an ‘80s movie I, Madman that I’d never heard of before and loved, in which a woman becomes obsessed with this pair of novels by a supposedly deceased writer, and the events start to blur with her own life.

I highly recommend people seek it out. I also enjoyed Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell, in which the cursed film is far more embedded in cinema history, even featuring famous actors.

Structurally, the novel has to let thirty years of dread compress into a present investigation without the book collapsing into flashback. What was the specific fix that let you move between 1994 and the present without losing momentum?

The key is not stopping everything in its tracks to cut to another scene. It would’ve probably been easy to jump into the occasional flashback since the book cuts between Val’s and Roxie’s POVs anyway, but then you have to build a whole chapter around a moment, when the moment alone is a far more powerful punch. It made more sense for Val to have a quiet breath of reminiscence while taking a smoke break or walking to her car. That’s how trauma comes in, taking a couple quick jabs to ruin your day before running off again.

The Toad Man apparently comes with his own song, a detail that could tip straight into camp in less careful hands. How do you calibrate rhythm and word choice at the sentence level so something as odd as a monster’s theme song reads as dread rather than as a joke?

It’s a little of both, but what matters is, who’s feeling the dread and who’s telling the joke? There’s a gleeful attitude of “you better watch out” in the lyrics, almost a warning. Except the warning is coming from the same source as the threat, so it feels more like a taunt, like it’s your fault if it gets you, and for a lot of people, there’s nothing more dreadful than feeling like something is your fault.

You’ve said before that horror prepares us for a world that can be horrific. Val spends this novel finding out that the preparation she gave herself, closing the curtain and insisting it was only a movie, was never going to be enough. Is there a version of preparation that actually works, or does horror only ever teach us how badly we are going to fail at it?

The preparation horror gives us is that we essentially micro-dose on stress for entertainment. We experience it in ways we control, such as being able to pause a movie or close a book. But what Val experiences isn’t fiction for her. She’s lost people. She isn’t preparing herself for a future threat; she’s avoiding her past. Maybe if she’d known the movie would be coming back, she would have acted differently. As it is, covering your ears and singing to yourself when there’s a problem doesn’t make the problem go away. It just means you can’t hear that song chanting “Toad Man, Toad Man” as whoever’s playing it creeps up on you.

This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want by Hailey Piper

A woman, haunted by the disappearance of her sister and best friend thirty years ago uncovers the terrifying urban legend behind the last film they watched together, in this chilling riff on the cursed film subgenre by the Bram Stoker award-winning author of Queen of Teeth.

Perfect for fans of Gretchen Felker-Martin and Andrew Joseph White.

In November 1994, three girls visit their local movie theater to see an obscure film. Only one of them is ever seen again.

Thirty years later, Val McQueen has never forgotten the day she lost her little sister and best friend, but she’s closed the curtain on it, certain she’s moved on despite her parents’ resentment and hounding by true crime enthusiasts.

That is until a stranger’s murder brings it all screaming back—a terror she’s tried to tell herself is only a movie. Enlisting the help of cinephile and former classmate Roxie de la Fontaine to find the film, Val soon realizes that hers is not the only pursuit. Someone, or something involved with the movie is on the hunt, too…

… For the girl who got away all those years ago.

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, A Game in Yellow, A Light Most Hateful, The Worm and His Kings series, and other books of dark fiction. She is also the author of over 120 short stories appearing in Weird Tales, Pseudopod, NYT-Bestselling anthology The End of the World As We Know It, and many other publications. Her non-fiction appears in Writer’s Digest, Library Journal, CrimeReads, and elsewhere. Find her at www.haileypiper.com.

Additional info:

Hailey Piper is represented by Lane Heymont of the Tobias Literary Agency.

---

Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror Reviews

---

Every feature is built to sell your work. We include backlinks to your website or Amazon author page, a full synopsis, and a universal purchasing link that sends readers straight to their local store. Add a large, engaged social following and an 18-year archive of trusted horror coverage, and you have a platform genuinely built to grow your readership.

Whether you’re an established author, an indie filmmaker, or a debut voice in indie horror, there’s a way for us to help you reach more fans. Explore our horror book reviews and horror movie reviews, then get your horror book or film featured today.