Moving Pictures recap

When the last keeper of an ancient rite at Holy Wood dies with no successor, something long buried under the hill begins to wake. In Ankh-Morpork the alchemist Thomas Silverfish invents moving pictures, and within weeks half the city feels an inexplicable urge to travel to Holy Wood and make them. Among them are Victor Tugelbend, a student wizard who has spent years avoiding graduation, and Ginger, a determined young woman who becomes the Disc's first leading lady. A boom town rises overnight, run by Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler; trolls, dwarfs and a talking dog named Gaspode pour in. But the pictures work because reality is thin at Holy Wood, and every audience that watches them makes it thinner. Ginger sleepwalks to a buried door beneath the hill. At the premiere of Dibbler's enormous epic the barrier gives way: Ginger is taken over and grows gigantic, climbing the Tower of Art with the Librarian, while things from outside reality pour into the city. Victor frees her and closes the way. Holy Wood burns, the industry vanishes overnight, and the sand covers the hill again.

On a stretch of empty coast called Holy Wood, an old man dies. He was the last of a line of keepers whose only duty was to perform a rite that kept something beneath the hill asleep, and there is no one to take his place. Not long afterwards, in Ankh-Morpork, the alchemist Thomas Silverfish stumbles on a way of capturing moving images: strips of octo-cellulose and small, very fast imps that paint what they see. The invention is a curiosity for about a week. Then people across the city begin to feel a pull they cannot explain, a conviction that they must go to Holy Wood, and they start walking. Among them is Victor Tugelbend, a student wizard at Unseen University who has spent years scoring exactly high enough not to be expelled and exactly low enough not to graduate, because his uncle's legacy pays only while he remains a student. He abandons the arrangement and heads for the coast.

Holy Wood becomes a boom town almost overnight: shacks, lots, handlemen turning the cranks of picture boxes, and a constant stream of new arrivals, human, dwarf and troll. Victor drifts into work as an extra and is quickly recognised as a natural leading man. He meets Ginger, a young woman from a small town who has come with the single-minded intention of becoming a star and has the talent to manage it, and the two are paired in picture after picture. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Ankh-Morpork's most tireless street trader, arrives, sees the possibilities immediately, and sets himself up as a producer. Nobody in Holy Wood asks why the place exists or why everyone felt compelled to come, and nobody notices that things there are becoming a little too much like a story.

The industry grows at a speed nobody controls. Dozens of short pictures are made every week, audiences form in every town, and Ankh-Morpork gets its first picture house. Ginger and Victor become the two most recognisable faces on the Disc. The magic soaking the place has side effects: animals begin to talk, among them Gaspode, a scruffy and deeply cynical mongrel who quickly decides that concealing his speech is more profitable than displaying it. Gaspode ends up ghost-thinking for Laddie, a handsome and entirely stupid dog who is made a canine star. Detritus, a troll looking for work, finds it, and finds Ruby, a troll singer, at the same time. Meanwhile Ginger has begun sleepwalking, leaving her lodgings at night and walking to the old hill above the town, and she remembers none of it in the morning.

Victor follows Ginger on one of her night walks and finds that she has been digging, and that beneath the hill there is a door and, behind it, a buried chamber older than any history Holy Wood has. He begins looking into what the place actually is, and finds traces of an earlier civilisation that made pictures here before, and of the keepers who spent centuries afterwards making sure nothing was disturbed. At Unseen University the instruments are showing something badly wrong, and the Librarian, who has been watching them, sets out for the coast. The new Archchancellor, Mustrum Ridcully, is dragged into the question by the readings and by the recollections of the very elderly Windle Poons, who remembers fragments of things the University has otherwise lost. Dibbler, indifferent to all of it, announces that he will make the largest picture ever attempted.

The wizards work out the shape of the danger. Holy Wood sits where the wall between the world and the Dungeon Dimensions is thin, and the pictures are not merely entertainment: an audience believing hard enough in what it sees is an opening, and every showing widens it. The creatures on the other side have been feeding on that belief and shaping what people want to watch. Ginger's sleepwalking is the buried presence reaching for a body. Filming of Dibbler's epic goes ahead at enormous scale and enormous expense, with elephants, thousands of extras and a budget that exists mainly as promises, and things begin to appear on the film that nobody put there. Victor and Ginger try to warn people and are ignored, because the show is now too large to stop, and the premiere is set for Ankh-Morpork.

The premiere fills the city. As the picture runs, the belief of the audience does exactly what the wizards feared, and reality gives way. Creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions come through into Ankh-Morpork, and the presence beneath Holy Wood takes Ginger entirely. She grows to enormous size, seizes the Librarian, and begins climbing the Tower of Art at the heart of Unseen University while the city watches from below, and the wizards and the Watch can do nothing that makes any difference. Victor, who now understands that Holy Wood runs on the logic of stories and that whatever is coming through needs a story in order to arrive, goes up the tower after her.

At the top of the tower Victor breaks the hold the buried presence has over Ginger and turns Holy Wood's own logic against the things using it, and the way between the worlds is shut. Ginger returns to her own size and her own mind, and the creatures are driven back. Holy Wood itself does not survive: the town is destroyed and the sand begins to bury the hill again. With the magic gone the entire industry collapses at once. The pictures stop working, the crowds disperse, and everyone who was famous a week ago is ordinary again. Dibbler returns to Ankh-Morpork and his sausage tray, already considering his next venture. Detritus and Ruby leave together for the city. Gaspode keeps his voice and his poor opinion of everyone. Victor and Ginger, free of fame and of the thing that made it, leave the ruins together, and the wizards go back to the University with the matter closed.

At the premiere of the great epic in Ankh-Morpork the barrier finally fails. The presence buried beneath Holy Wood takes Ginger completely, and she grows to enormous size and climbs the Tower of Art carrying the Librarian, while creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions force their way through into the city. Victor climbs after her, breaks the hold on her, and turns the logic of Holy Wood back against what is using it, and the way through is shut. Holy Wood does not survive it. The town is destroyed and the sand begins to cover it again, and with the magic gone the whole industry collapses as suddenly as it appeared: the pictures stop working, the crowds go home, and the people who were stars a week earlier are simply people again. Dibbler goes back to Ankh-Morpork and to selling sausages, already thinking about the next thing. Detritus and Ruby stay together and leave for the city. Gaspode keeps his voice, and his opinions. Victor and Ginger, no longer famous and no longer needed, walk away from the ruins together. The wizards return to Unseen University under their new Archchancellor with the affair closed, and the hill above Holy Wood is quiet again.