This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want Review: The Screen Bites Back

A lost movie, a missing sister and one of horror’s strangest monsters step out of the dark.

Hailey Piper’s This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want takes the cursed film tale into a much darker place. Val McQueen has spent thirty years with the loss of her young sister and best friend, who went missing during a horror film in 1994. When the past starts to stir, a search for lost media leads into grief, true-crime hunger, queer bonds and cosmic fear. Piper makes the screen itself feel unsafe. Film is no mere prop here. It is part of the threat, a way to ask what we see, what we copy, and what may look back.

This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want | Hailey Piper | Titan Books | 15 September 2026 |

Piper turns the screen from a place we watch into a thing that watches back, and makes the old cursed-film trick feel dangerous again.

This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want by Hailey Piper Review: The Screen Bites Back

Some fears hide in the dark. Others wait for us to look.

Hailey Piper knows the gap between those two things. She takes a bad old horror film, a lost girl, a friend who vanished, and a thing called the Toad Man. That name should make us grin. It does, for a beat. Then Piper makes the grin feel unsafe. Soon the joke has teeth.

In 1994, Val McQueen goes to the pictures with her young sister, Ash, and her best friend, Colette. They pick a rare B-movie called Blood-Curse of the Toad Man. Val walks out. The other two do not. No one can tell her where they went. No one can make sense of what she saw.

Thirty years pass. Val now works as a tattoo artist near Baltimore. She has built a life, but not peace. Her mum and dad still bear the hurt of that old night. Strangers who feed on true crime keep the case alive for their own ends. Val tries to leave it all behind. Then the film comes back into her life.

She turns to Roxie de la Fontaine, an old schoolmate who knows how to hunt lost media. What starts as a search for one old film soon grows far more strange. The pair can find hints that the film was once there, but almost no firm trace of it. It sits on the edge of fact. A few people seem to know it. Most do not. The more they seek it, the less safe the act of seeking feels.

That is where Piper makes the old cursed-film plot her own.

A lesser book might use the film as a box with a curse in it. Find it. Play it. Pay the price. That can work, but Piper wants more. She asks what a film is once it leaves the reel. Is it the print? The tale? The shot in your head? The fear you pass on to the next person? If no copy can be found, can a film still hunt you?

The first scene in the theatre shows how well this works. Fear comes in small steps. First, there is a bad smell. Then there is a large man in a coat and hat behind the girls. He makes wet sounds. Each time they look, he seems near, though no one sees him move.

That last part does the real work. If a beast walks down an aisle, we know what it did. We know where it was, then where it went. Piper takes that link away. The Toad Man is not seen on the move. He is just closer. The room has changed while no one watched it change. In a tale about film, that is a sharp trick. A cut can do the same thing. One frame ends. The next starts. The mind fills the gap.

Piper uses film lore with care. The nods are not there to prove she knows the right names. They shape the book. Some scenes feel like noir. Some feel like a cheap late-night creature show. Others slip past both and turn dreamlike. Dark rooms, weak light, old screens and lost prints all become part of the fear.

The prose fits that plan. It is like an old projector with a torn reel. Most of the time the image holds. Then it skips. Light flares. The frame seems to burn from the middle. Piper can be plain when the hunt needs pace. When Val gets near the truth, the words can grow less firm. The form starts to share the fear.

Val gives all this weight. She is not a tool built to carry a cool plot. She is a woman who has spent most of her life in the wake of one night. Worse, other people have had a say in what that night means.

Her parents have grief. So does Val. Yet grief does not bind them. It drives them apart. The cold space in that family feels harsh because it has had three decades to set. Piper does not make pain wise or fair. People can lose the same person and still hurt each other in ways that do not heal.

Then there are the true-crime fans. They want clues. They want a tale they can solve. They want Val to give them the parts they need. That adds a mean, sharp edge to the book. Val did not only lose two people. She lost the right to keep that loss to herself.

Piper sees the bad deal at the heart of much true crime. The dead turn into stuff. The one who lived turns into a source. The crowd gets to call its need to know a form of care. It is not hard to see why Val wants no part of it.

Roxie gives the book air. She knows old films and the odd half-life of things that fall out of sight but stay in the mind. She can take Val’s fear at face value without treating Val like a freak. That makes her more than a guide who feeds facts to the plot.

The two women have a past. They also have to learn how to work in the same space as adults. There is strain, wit and warmth between them. That warmth counts. It keeps the book from turning into a cold game of clues. We care about what the truth may cost because we care about the people who have to face it.

This is part of a long line in Piper’s work. The Worm and His Kings set vast fear next to love, need and queer life. A Light Most Hateful bent the world round the strain of a close bond. All the Hearts You Eat tied grief and queer kin to old tales and blood. A Game in Yellow took a well-known weird text and made it close, hot and human.

This new book feels like the next step. Piper has long liked big, strange forces. Yet the scale is never the whole point. What matters is what those forces do to people who still have to get up, work, love, fail and try again.

There are clear peers for this kind of tale. Gemma Files’s Experimental Film puts old film next to a force far older than film. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate links film stock, dark rites and the past. Paul Tremblay’s Horror Movie looks at the way a failed shoot can live on through myth and remake.

Piper earns a place by them, but she does not copy their path. Her key move is to make film itself part of the threat. The screen is not just where the curse shows up. The act of film, of taking an image, making a copy, casting light through it and asking us to trust what we see, sits at the core of the fear.

That is why the Toad Man works.

Say the name out loud. It sounds daft. It sounds like a suit hung at the back of a prop shed. That is the point. Horror has always shared a wall with camp. A rubber mask can look cheap at noon and vile at two in the morning. A fake thing can still make the heart race. Piper knows that fear does not need good taste.

The Toad Man comes from that grubby zone where trash art can turn pure and strange. He should stay on the screen. He should obey the rule that says the crowd is safe and the cast is not. Once that rule fails, the whole room goes wrong.

Some early readers have pushed back at the pace, most of all in the long talk that sits between the first shock and the last rush. I had no such fight with it. The talk gives the fear time to stain normal life. It lets Val and Roxie grow close. It also stops each clue from becoming a mere step on a plot map.

The late turn into deep, wild cosmic horror may split people too. Again, that is part of the draw. If Piper gave the Toad Man a neat list of rules and a clean source, she would make him small. A thing like this should not fit on a chart. The book gains force when the hunt for facts starts to break the shape of fact.

There is a smart thread here about art and copies. I will keep the plot part of that sealed. What matters is the question. Can a thing copy the face of art and still miss the human act that made it? Can it take shape, style and form, yet leave out the spark?

That gives the book a bite that reaches past its 1994 gloss. This is not a soft trip back to old shops, old tapes and old screens. Piper knows that nostalgia can lie. We trim the dull bits from the past. We warm the light. We keep the song we liked. Then we call the cut “how it was.”

Val cannot do that. Too many people have cut her past for her. Her own mind has had to live with gaps. Her family has made one tale from the loss. True-crime fans have made more. The film does the same in a much worse way. It turns pain into an image and asks who gets to own the frame.

That theme gives the title real force. At first it sounds like a sly warning. Do not hope for a kind last act. By the end, it means more.

We want tales to fix things. We want the lost to come home. We want blame to find the right door. We want the beast to have rules. We want pain to add up to a prize called peace.

Piper will not make that deal.

A five-star horror book should take a risk that feels hard to pull off, then make the risk seem like the only right choice. This one does. It takes a well-worn hook and runs queer grief, lost film, old shame, true crime and cosmic fear through it. Then it turns the light back at us.

It scares because Piper knows how film works. It hurts because she knows what we ask stories to mend.

The screen goes black. The thing behind your seat is close. Buy the ticket anyway.

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.

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