Review: The Film You Are About To See by Haley Newlin

Rating: 8.5/10

It’s 1959 in a rural Indiana town, and the local drive-in is hosting their first-ever Dusk Til Dawn Spooktacular!

And they’ve got a Percepto surprise in store for the audience, complete with vomit bags, nurses on staff, and a hearse parked just beneath the monsters onscreen.

But June has a strange sense about things. Always has. And as the screams spread through the parking lot, reality and theatrics begin to blur for her and her friends. Is it just a gimmick, or is something lurking amongst the moviegoers?

Many credit King with detonating a real modern golden age in horror. Carrie in 1974, and the Brian De Palma film adaptation two years later certainly marked a shift in how horror was marketed and consumed. It wasn’t the first tremor though- some go back further, perhaps to the early 19th Century, when Shelley wrote Frankenstein, or earlier yet with Walpole in the mid 18th. The horror genre, I would argue, is where it is today via a series of pulses and shifts, some subtle, some seismic. A rather nuclear, too-often-overlooked high-point though is the 50s. It was a decade that saw “House of Wax,” and a little later (the delightfully amorphous) “The Blob,” and a little later still “The Fly,” and it’s finally given some credit in “The Film You Are About to See.” A bloody romp that may play out in black and white in the heads of readers, yet is anything but, Haley Newlin’s (referential yet truly original) latest smells like buttered popcorn and burning flesh. A novella clearly forged in appreciation of the retro, of grainy horror flicks, of William Castle and Vincent Price and the horror renaissance they helped spark- how could “The Film You Are About to See,” not be an absolute scream? Action-packed, but leaving room for real introspection, Newlin’s latest is a triumphant ode to cinema, out October 14th from Mad Axe Media.

Our cast is made up mostly of seven. Six friends: Ingrid, Stef, Lenny, Vincent, Arthur, June… and the creature. June is an empath in the extreme sense. She can feel others pain, and sense when something is off. Friday August 7th 1959, thus may be the worst night of her life. Having lost her Grandma days before, June feels it’s important that she get herself out of the house, and spend time with her friends. Big into her horror flicks, the DUSK ‘TIL DAWN SPOOKTACULAR, in theory, could not have been better timed. Of course, that applies less to the unspeakable terror that goes down at the lot that night.

A cast of seven, excluding side characters, in a book well under 200 pages, would ordinarily be cause for concern, yet Newlin manages to render everybody, including those who meet gruesome ends early on with astonishing depth. June is a wonderful protagonist, a brave lead, who much like SGJ’s Jade Daniels has an unwavering love and encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre- this time, the lo-fi, brilliant cinema that came before the conventional slasher. She is vulnerable and headstrong and genre-literate. Her burden, extreme empathy, is one juxtaposed by that of the creature, who, admittedly for its own reasons, has an utter disregard for the human race, and is ready to put on a show. June feels everything, the creature feels nothing. The two clash in a bloody, campy, epic battle, with a backdrop of burning celluloid, that made me want to dim the lights and pop myself some popcorn immediately. 

It’s a romp. It is gimmicky- and Newlin leans into this with a theatrical glee, embracing its drive-in B-movie roots wholly. But that’s not to say that it isn’t devoid of deeper meaning and commentary though. Whilst the 50s were a wonderful time to exist as a cinephile, the same can’t be said for any minority, and the issues of race and sexuality and gender are confronted in a thoughtful but ferocious manner. Our monster has quite the origin story, and with it comes a strong message regarding the silencing, condemnation, and prosecution of women. The infuriatingly flagrant and hypocritical use and weaponization of the word hysterical is a recurring motif, and it’s a pointed one. Whilst in regard to blood and guts and caved in faces, you get a whole lot of bang for your buck, there’s substance beneath the spectacle.

Full of appreciation for the genre, beautifully written, and above all, a really fun time, wrapped in a celluloid skin of pure retro camp “The Film You Are About to See,” is a story that will not release readers from its pincered grip until the end credits roll. With nods to Castle and Price and their B-Movie brethren, this is a creature feature with claws and brains that is not to be missed.