Either I'm a lot dumber than I thought, or this book isn't as smart as it thinks it is. Or maybe both. Ambiguity! It's a bitch. 
 Scott McGrath used to be a hotshot investigative journalist until he started looking into mysterious and reclusive film director Stanilas Cordova who has been holed up in his remote estate making underground masterpieces of suspense that seem to ruin the lives of almost everyone involved with them. (Think M. Night Shyamalan before we all realized that he actually sucks.) 
 McGrath trashed his career by making accusations against Cordova based on a single source he didn't verify. When Cordova's talented daughter Ashley commits suicide by leaping down an elevator shaft in an abandoned building McGrath decides that he can vindicate himself by looking into her death as a way into once again digging into Cordova's life. Circumstances force McGrath into a reluctant partnership with a shady young man with a personal connection to Ashley and a young actress wannabe who met the doomed woman shortly before she died. 
 That's when things start getting weird. Is Cordova a brilliant but eccentric filmmaker, or is he an evil puppet master willing and capable of destroying people's lives via unknown forces? Was Ashley just a confused young woman who met an untimely end, or was she stalked by supernatural evil brought about somehow by her father? McGrath's investigation dumps him into a maze that leaves him questioning reality itself. 
 As a kid growing up in the '70s there were some horror movies that took on an almost legendary quality back in those pre-Internet days. You'd hear adults talking about something called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and someone with wide eyes would confidently assert in a whisper that it was based on a true story. Or some kid at school would tell you that that his brother had told him that the devil was actually in The Exorcist. There's a story in my family about how my aunt was so terrified after seeing The Shining that she demanded that my uncle take her to another movie immediately afterwards because she was positive that she wouldn't be able to sleep for days if she didn't do something to try and get it out of her head that very second. 
 That's the power that horror movies used to have, and I think a lot of that has been lost in these days of DVD directors' commentaries and IMDB trivia pages. What I liked a lot about Night Film is that it seemed to recapture some of that old spirit. One of the creepiest aspects was that idea that a movie can be dangerous because some filmmakers are so deranged and/or tapped into something strange that could literally cause psychological damage to a viewer. Cordova as this mysterious figure whose films inspire underground viewings and a cult following was suitably spooky and unsettling. There's an underlying theme of hidden worlds that can be accessed or expressed via film that I would have liked more of. 
 I think where I ran into problems personally is that the book tries to have it both ways. It's functioning on some levels as a pretty standard thriller, and if you judge it like that, I found things like the characters actions and plot machinations kind of cliched. However, if you look at it as more of a David Lynch kind of experience, something where the normal rules get checked at the door, then it feels more ambitious and even a little dangerous. 
 Yet, it doesn't seem to want to just dive in and go bananas either. It was almost like the grounding of the story dug in a little too much and started to feel like an anchor that really didn't let the weird aspects hit their fullest potential. It's hard to explain without writing an entire essay about the plot. I can sum it up by saying that while I know the story is about the ambiguity of walking through the shadows, I think it either needed to turn the lights completely on or off at some point. Which isn't entirely fair because it's obvious that the author was trying to walk that line and does it pretty well, but for me I would have liked a bit more commitment one way or another. 
 One other note about the multimedia aspects. The book has a lot of graphics in the form of pictures, news stories, and web pages, and I downloaded the app that lets you scan some of these that provides bonus content like audio recordings or a diary of a character. That was generally well done as a way to provide some extra atmosphere without being too much of a distraction. I wouldn't want it in every book, but for a story like this it was a gimmick that worked well without being overused.