You've found your seat and are all settled. The annoyingly-easy movie trivia has ended, the local business slides run their course, the poor-resolution TV commercials have played, the trailers have been shown, and the lights have gone down. The studio logo shows, the music starts, and the terror begins.
Horror movies are great. They're among my favourite things in the world. They can make us scream, inspire relieved laughter, tense up our muscles and make our hairs stand on end, bring us closer together as an audience, and, at least I've been told, get our dates excited. As great as horror movies are at home, they're even better in the theatre.
The ambience. The darkness. The lack of distractions. The group dynamic. The endlessly ringing cellphones. Ahhh.
When I was going to film school, I read a quote (it might have been from Carl Laemmle, I'm not sure) that said, "The cinema is the religion of the 20th Century." While that infuriated many of the religious fanatics sitting around me, who banded together to lynch the book's publisher and the quoter's descendents, it struck a particular chord with yours truly. After all, there is something sort of ritualistic and reverent about moviegoing. Where else in the last century did people from different backgrounds and walks of life get together and share a communal experience in which they laughed, cried, screamed, and cheered as one voice? Where, for two hours in their busy and careworn days, they can forget about their problems and live vicariously through the characters on the silver screen, leaving the theater changed, hopefully for the better?
I thought that was a nice statement, that the movie theatre was the house of worship of the 20th Century. As a child, it certainly was a sacred, special place to me. We didn't go to the cinema very often, though my mother loved the movies. Because I had an overactive imagination and a complete inability to sit still, I might have been left home instead of taken along a lot of times. The closest theater was fifteen miles from our house, but often we'd drive into the "city" which was thirty-something miles away, and that was a big deal in the days of gasoline running for . . . gasp! . . . forty cents a gallon. So on the rare occasion that I got to go to the movies, I knew it was something really good (like Disney animated fare, or Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the new Star Trek film), and I counted myself fortunate and tried to be on my best behaviour.
It was always a family movie, and with one rare exception, never in the genre of Horror. My mother told me the story of going to see The Exorcist with my dad, and being so freaked out about it that . . . wait, that might explain my upbringing.
In recent years, I have seen countless horror flicks on video and television, hundreds of them for this website alone. And I'm here to tell you that I missed out.
As I said in my review of Hannibal, I felt supremely sad when I watched the bonus footage on the DVD of theatre-goers shrieking, turning away from the screen in revulsion, and basically freaking out at the movie's most grotesque scene. I didn't see it on the big screen, so I didn't get to share that with them, I didn't get to participate in their unique experience, and I don't have that story to tell.
I don't know what the first horror film I saw in the theatre was. Gremlins, probably (unless Orca, the Killer Whale counts). The small-town theater, not far from my future-friend tyranist's house, had a sign they added to their marquee three times that year that said, "Not for Kids." The other two films were Splash and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, if you're curious. The theater was packed with children and adults alike, many of them cooing when they saw little Gizmo, and groaning when they saw those gross cocoons. And when that one gremlin exploded in the microwave, so did the audience, laughing and recoiling and crying out and asking, "Did you see that?" to the person next to them. Wow, that was more than twenty years ago, kids, can you believe it?
There's nothing like a darkened theater, a crowd of excited young people (because who else goes to see horror movies?), and a good scare or two. I'll never forget how I felt seeing Pet Sematary with my uncle and aunt, a movie he pronounced as "not right." That movie really freaked me out. Up on the big screen, everything seemed more dangerous and more real. I pulled my legs up like a foetus, just in case . . . something, I didn't know what, wanted to grab them from under the seat.
I never tire of telling about the reaction I got from a guy two rows up after screaming bloody murder in the middle of I Know What You Did Last Summer. He came up to me as the credits were rolling and said, "Man, you scared the CRAP out of me!" I thought, Uh oh, somebody's about to make Mrs. Outfield a widow, and said, "I'm so sorry about that." But the guy laughed and said, "No, that's cool. That's cool, man." That sort of thing wouldn't happen outside of a movie theatre; either my roommates would've set me on fire, or the neighbors would have called the police.
It is great to see a genre flick in a public environment. There's that group dynamic you get in the theater, the shared experience whoever it was they quoted in my film class was talking about. I saw Misery with a bunch of girls, and Signs with my mom and sisters. I saw Scream 1 & 2 with my roommate John, Silence of the Lambs with my favourite cousin, The Hitcher with my Uncle Ali. Those experiences were memorable, in part, by the locale I saw them in, and the added effort it takes to see them that way. On the very few instances where I have done the whole "geek in line" thing, regardless of how good or bad the movie was, I always have a good story to tell, and it's the experience that I end up remembering, almost always in a postitive light.
I've been lucky in the last few years, really making an effort to see Horror on the big screen, to have a few neat experiences. I saw The Gift with Sam Raimi and The Evil Dead with members of the cast and crew. I got to see House of Wax and Friday the 13th III the way they were meant to be seen, in a theater in three glorious dimensions. I was able to view Scream with Wes Craven and The Mummy Returns with The Rock. I was one of the few Americans to get to check out Dog Soldiers in the movie theatre. I saw Dragonfly with Leonard Maltin and Halloween with Kevin Williamson and Jamie Lee Curtis. Pretty neat, huh? And I got to see The Sixth Sense with my friend tyranist.
Very few of the reviews on this site tell of how and with whom I saw a film. Because I've seen it done poorly elsewhere, I don't usually go into those kinds of detail. But I could, and maybe I should. For example, I saw The Others and Session 9 in a double feature at a run-down Hollywood art house during Los Angeles County's allotted once-a-year rainstorm. Because the walls of the building were so thin, every time there was a quiet moment in both films, you could hear the thunder and the falling rain pouring outside. It was great, increasing the ambiance and making the experience seem almost interactive and alive somehow.
Tyranist made the grand gesture this past Christmas to sacrifice two hours from his eleven screaming kids and two-and-a-half shrieking wives to go out to the theater and see Gothika with me. We had a really good time. True, two of his children were dead when we returned home, one of his wives had left him, and his house had burned down, but I thought it was still a really nice night.
Look, I'm not blind to reality. There are plenty of reasons to not see a movie in the theaters: it's expensive, it's a hassle, people are assholes, lines are sometimes long, the seats are less comfortable than a couch, parking can be difficult, the floors are sometimes sticky, the forces conspiring to kill me might see me there, etc. But the tradition of movie theater is a big deal, and movies are simply better on the big screen, end of story.
That's why I suggest you get out and see your next horror film in the theater. You'll be glad you did. But let's limit the bloodletting to the screen . . . please turn off your cellphone.
Rish Tiberius Outfield
2004