5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988)
Generally speaking, describing a movie as “absorbing” is done as a compliment. But for A Nightmare on Elm Street 4’s Alice, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While in a dream, she wanders into an old-timey cinema. The scattered, solo patrons and art deco architecture already imbue this space with a liminal feeling, as if Alice is already stuck between worlds and the real nightmare hasn’t even started. Before she even gets a chance to enjoy her popcorn, she’s quite literally sucked into the screen and the black and white film playing out on it. This is both an impressive technical trick on director Renny Harlin’s part and a surreal standout moment from the film. It’ll also make us think twice next time we praise a film for being immersive. (Anna Swanson)
4. The Tingler (1959)
Whether filmmakers intend to or not, there will always be a layer of kitsch when a horror movie takes place in a movie theater. It’s impossible not to see people watching a movie, while you’re watching a movie, and not think “Hey look! It’s me!” It’s a brand of meta-humor that is delicious to indulge, but no director embraced it better than William Castle. Not only did the gimmick-prone auteur sick his titular fear-tumor on his movie-going characters, but he did the same to the real-life audiences watching The Tingler. With his “Percepto!” stunt, Castle installed tiny buzzers into select seats to give the audience electroshocks, immersing them into the climactic scene when the Tingler gets loose in a movie theater.
Enhancing this experience, the scene cuts to black and the cinema is plunged into darkness as Vincent Price’s voice-over would encourage the audience to scream and scream again to keep the beast at bay. While the movie itself is an accomplishment in its early usage of body horror aesthetics – the creature is a psychological manifestation turned to flesh – it is Castle’s ingenious theatrical embellishments that have cemented the film’s legacy. (Jacob Trussell)
3. Scream 2 (1997)
Across its four films, Wes Craven’s Scream series articulates some brilliantly dark musings about our cultural relationship with on-screen horror, but few hit home as pointedly as the opening sequence of Scream 2. In a fantastic mix of humor, horror, and meta-commentary, Maureen (Jada Pinkett Smith) and her boyfriend, Phil (Omar Epps) go to a rowdy late-night screening of Stab, the movie based on the events of the first Scream film. After a discussion about horror’s abysmal track record with diversity, Phil is quickly dispatched during a bathroom trip by the new ghost-faced killer.
Unfortunately, since all the attendees were given promotional masks and toy knives, Maureen doesn’t notice when the murderer returns to the theater in her boyfriend’s place. We watch her and dozens of other teenagers cheer for on-screen kills that are “based on a true story,” and the celebration only stops once Maureen is stabbed by Ghostface and stumbles up in front of the screen, bloodied and screaming. The line between entertainment and exploitation is paper-thin, and Craven won’t let us forget it. (Valerie Ettenhofer)
2. The Blob (1988)
There are many reasons to watch the 1988 remake of The Blob: the practical effects, the genre-deft of writer Frank Darabont, and The Garden Tool Massacre, the film-within-the-film that plays during The Blob’s requisite theater scene. If you know one thing about the original film (other than, yes, it’s about a blob), it’s that the titular pile of extra-terrestrial goo invades a movie theater. The remake matches the original beat-for-beat with its movie theater horror: blob invades projection booth, blob pools out of projection booth, patrons flee screaming as the blob dines out.
But because the 1988 Blob is that bitch, it’s a billion times better. Where to begin? The jarring liquefication of the projectionist? The horrific mélange of corroded skin and popcorn? The intense strobing effect, rendering this better, faster, stronger blob all the more terrifying? The whole sequence is a gore hound’s delight, even if that asshole in the back row won’t shut up. If only something were to happen to him… (Meg Shields)
1. Demons (1985)
The 1980s saw a slew of horror movies banned or censored because of their cinematic violence. Many of the movies were gory Italian numbers that pushed the envelope too far in the eyes of party-pooping film classification boards and politicians. They thought these movies caused harm and inspired psychopaths, which wasn’t the case at all. Lamberto Bava’s Demons satirizes this conservative mindset by actually having the movie-within-the-movie unleash deadly hellspawn on the patrons of a movie theater. Cue lots of chaos, including a scene where a motorcyclist takes out demons with a katana sword, and you have a film representing the best in movie theater horror. (Kieran Fisher)
Related Topics: 31 Days of Horror Lists, Horror
