In 1931 in the lumber-rich town of Pilot’s Creek, Virginia, a mother and her nine-year-old daughter are burned at the stake by vengeful townspeople (men, of course). For years, it’s been an open secret that Ella Louise Ford can cure what ails you, and her young daughter Jessica appears to be even more gifted. But witches living in the woods can only be tolerated for so long, and when Ella Louise’s treatments are suspected of causing a tragedy, the men of the town want the witches to pay.

In 1951, an old man tells ghost stories around a campfire, always coming back to the story of Jessica Ford, the Little Witch Girl. Ella Louise was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere deep in the woods, but little Jessica was buried in hallowed ground, in a reinforced coffin with cement filling in the grave and a fence of crucifixes to keep her in. Now, legend has it that the Little Witch Girl wants out, and she just needs someone to help her find her mother.

In 1971, a man who heard the ghost story as a child is determined to make a movie about Jessica — a shlocky horror film called Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave, filled with standard horror movie tropes, and starring an eerily perfect young actress named Amber. But something happens on set, and it’s the legend behind the movie that makes this a story that becomes a horror cult classic.

In 1995, Amber is a drug-dependent has-been who never had a career after her early disaster, but who instead has found fame of sorts on the horror convention circuit. When an up-and-coming director decides to make a remake of Jessica’s story, Amber seems like the perfect choice to play Ella Louise — until on-set tragedy strikes again.

And finally, in 2016, a podcaster who debunks urban legends decides to tackle the story of the Little Witch Girl and prove it’s a hoax once and for all… but is he ready for what he’ll find in the woods?

I realize I’ve just outlined the entire book, but trust me, you have to read it to get the full creepy experience. The story of Ella Louise and Jessica starts with tragedy. Ella Louise is different, a disgrace to her society parents, and it’s implied but never explained that she became pregnant with Jessica as the result of a sexual assault on the night of her debutante ball. But rather than being supported as a crime victim, she’s shunned by her parents and the town, and makes a new life for herself and her daughter, out in the woods where no one can harm them.

I had a hard time getting over the origin story of Ella Louise and Jessica, because it’s so harrowing and awful. But from there, we see how the tale takes on a life of its own… and how something that may be just a story has doomed the town and everyone connected with it. Is it truly a witch’s curse, or is it the story that haunts the town and brings destruction to everyone who encounters it?

Amber’s tale is chilling in very different ways. Forced into pursuing her big break by a mother who never realized her own dream of stardom, Amber is way too young to be able to handle the horror of shooting Don’t Tread on Jessica’s Grave. From the movie’s storyline to seeing herself transformed through makeup and prosthetics into a burned corpse, this is clearly something that will scar her forever — and that’s before she has a nearly deadly encounter in the woods.

Jessica had become a cinematic ouroboros. A serpent devouring its own tail, coiling round and round for an eternity. The longer I imagined that snake infinitely spinning, the more its scales slowly took on the shape of celluloid frames. The sprocket holes along either side of the film strip formed scales. When this snake shed its skin, the translucent husk would be fed through the projector. The images trapped within each scale caught the projector’s light and made their way to the big screen. Jessica filled that vast canvas, reaching her hand out to me.

This film would never end. It continued to play on its own endless loop. Jessica’s story would be told over and over, forever now. She found a new audience.

Fresh blood.

That was exactly what Jessica wanted.

To find new blood.

A ghost story, a consideration of urban legends, a look at the need to endlessly remake movies into something new for each generation — The Remaking provides so much to think about, even while being a chilling, creepy, intensely haunting read.