My scariest theater-going experience

  Genuine question: have you ever gotten so mad that you started crying? I mean that teeth-clenching anger where you're so overwhelmed with rage that your body needs an outlet so tears start flowing uncontrollably. That's what this movie did to me.

  I'd gone to see When Evil Lurks (Cuando El Mal Achecha) based on a month-long flurry of hype online, a glowing recommendation by Luke, and sheer curiosity because I had loved Demián Rugna's previous feature Terrified (Aterrados). Luke specifically told me he was nearly curled up in a ball by the end of it and that was huge because 1) it's rare that he's scared by any modern horror and 2) he isn't one to peddle hyperbole.

  So I was already bracing for it.

  Omens didn't just seem to foretell how this was going to go: they kept stacking on top of one another.

  • On my walk up to the theater I saw a janitor scooping up a dead bird.

  • Then the ticket taker winced and asked "Are you sure?" as she bared her teeth scanning my ticket.

  • It was only screening in auditorium 13.

  • During the trailers no one else came in, I was completely alone and it stayed that way.

  • Whence it got going, about 15 or 20 minutes in, I wasn't quite scared yet (though definitely tense) bu the power suddenly went out.

  Because it went so dark and quiet so abruptly, everything I just told you coalesced into one cumulative paranoid epiphany: "Holy shit, is this movie cursed?"

  The power eventually kicked back on and they restarted the movie. The screening was otherwise normal but my engagement with it was unlike any other. There are three key moments that scared the Hell out of me but one was so...I guess inconsiderate? I remember feeling mad that a jumpscare gave me the "gotcha!" jolt but I was downright furious because it was so sadistic. This polluted the atmosphere with an oppressive fog that never dissipated. Even though I was alone and there was screaming and music to drown me out, I couldn't muster the will to spit out the "Oh, fuck off" clogging my throat.

  I was so unnerved that that I couldn't focus. I still have a loose grasp on anything that happened because every relevant detail, plot or character-wise, got lost. As for the mounting dialog about lore and minutiae, I gathered what I could. So I don't even know if everything beyond the scares is even good or not; character arcs, plot development, editing, pacing, climax, dialog, catharsis? I'd need a rewatch to tell you. But did it make me feel sick to my stomach, angry, and tight in my throat? Absolutely.

  That thought, "Holy shit, is this movie cursed?", spawned by the seemingly random dead bird, auditorium 13, and the power outage, would inflate as the movie went on. The irony couldn't be more perfect as the story is explicitly about paying attention and not ignoring warning signs. In an absurd, abstract way I felt like an active participant in the movie rather than a spectator behind the 4th wall. As the old joke goes, "God replied 'My son, I sent you two boats and a helicopter'."

  This is a hopeless, miserable, disgusting movie and, when I calmed down during the credits and my mood lifted, I appreciated it for giving me one Hell of a horror experience. I left right as the credits came up and drove home extra carefully.

Scary moments when I least expected them

   JURASSIC PARK III

  This scene wasn't meant to be scary, quite the opposite, but it still made me feel like my heart was going to stop. And that's the ethos of this post: scenes from movies and TV that, intended to be scary or not, we didn't expect them to. Of course I went into a Jurassic Park movie expecting to get scared but...not...like this.

  There's just something so evocative about one guy in a suit suddenly standing at the beach's edge, clutching a megaphone, that made my neck hairs stand on end. I still remember being so bewildered by it that my imagination went fucking wild in the seconds before the military emerged; he felt dastardly, like he was the cause for everything that'd been happening. Every single fucking thing about him felt menacing. The contrast of how well-dressed and calm he is, as opposed to how dirty, bloody, and frightened everyone else is made him all the more uncanny. Not to mention his distance in the frame: he felt supernatural, like a mirage come to life. And then when he deliberately used the megaphone with no hesitation, breaking a rule firmly set by the movie, he was willfully inviting danger. He made the dinosaurs feel threatening in a way they hadn't for most of the runtime. Hell, he made reality feel like it was at his will.

  What's funny is I saw Prince Of Darkness much later and, during the 'Pray For Death' scene, I got deja vu. Same with any ghostly appearance of Jack's Dad on LOST. Now when I watch Jurassic Park III I see this scene for the lazy deus ex machina that it is but I'll never forget how disarmingly surreal it was that first time.

  Better Call Saul

  I almost wrote about a moment from Breaking Bad but it has so many that I became accustomed to any episode having the potential to be scary (the end of Crawl Space, Gus' death, Skyler walking in on a ski-masked Todd in Holly's bedroom, any scene with The Cousins). Saul wasn't ever scary. It was tense, for sure, but for five seasons we were safe from the BrBa team venturing into their most dreadful territory.

Then Lalo killed Howard.

  More accurately, the moment before he killed Howard scared me more than the actual act itself; as soon as he walked in I knew Howard was dead. But more specifically, zooming in even closer: it's the choice to make it feel like a haunting that landed it on this list. Kim had opened a window so a candle flickers from the draft as Lalo opens the door. Jimmy notices it in the corner of his eye and the abject fright on his face when Lalo walks in, back from the dead, tore down the prequel safety net for me. 'The Mouth,' as Lalo called him, can't talk his way out of this because he's too stunned to use his superpower. We eventually see Lalo die (which is eerie in its own right, him smiling with a mouth full of blood) but to Jimmy he's Schrodinger's Cartel member: which is why he thinks Walt and Jesse were sent by him in BrBa, he's a ghost who never stopped haunting him.

  TÁR

  Word-of-mouth helped build this haunt (with unintended irony). I was late seeing this because it was in limited release and then never came within less than an hour of me in its eventual wide exhibition. So I did what I usually do when I get cinematic FOMO: I read reviews/blurbs and perused the sea of memes it'd spawned. Lydia Tár was a big deal for a while and this movie was, for terminally online cinephiles, like proto-Barbenheimer. Because of the memes and, I guess, a few amusing scenes (??) it was frequently referred to as a comedy or, at the very least, funny for a drama. Having seen it: it's not...unfunny, I just don't think it's often very comedic. If anything it's the driest, most sardonic comedy in recent memory; pithy and mirthless. But, going in, I didn't know that, so I was expecting something a bit more pointedly funny. And even if it wasn't as funny to me as others, I expected a potent drama.

   But Jesus Christ, it's filled with eerie shit. Like, hidden ghosts in The Haunting Of Hill House or hidden demons in LONGLEGS make sense, but the spectres who hide in Tár's compositions made the movie itself feel haunted. I was almost wondering if I had gotten ahold of some different cut or something. Even the Blair Witch Project scene completely took me by surprise (I still don't fully get why it's there). And, again, contributed to this feeling that the movie was ...somehow...broken? I often wonder how it would have affected me if I didn't go in with any expectations but, as it stands, I'm glad that happened to me. The first time She appeared it unnerved me but, holy shit, the second time?? It had me checking over my shoulder and turning lights on. From then on the frame was dangerous: every inch could be hiding something.

TITANIC

  Despite the image speaking for itself (loud and clear) I have so much to say about this moment. The last act of Titanic, where Rose is running around the flooded hallways with flickering lights and no score, just the sounds of sloshing and metallic creaking, is already creepy. She encounters people who are desperate and bewildered, some become outright antagonistic, or others who dart by and we never see again; it feels like the apocalypse in micro. Gradually, thrilling spectacle and romantic melodrama eclipse the creepiness as Rose and Jack make their way back outside. Despite how uneasy and [literally] chilling the atmosphere becomes when they make it to and on the door, with the cobalt sky and the litany of screams in the desolation of the ocean, I'd let my guard down. So, when we got to the floating corpses, I vividly remember covering my eyes when I saw her face. And I'd 'see' her later that night when I got up to go to the bathroom. Like, I got to see Kate Winslet half-naked at 8 years-old, my first encounter with nudity in a movie, but that frozen woman in the life-jacket was on the dovetail of any memories from our screening. This was a formative movie for me because, after we saw it, my Mom decided it was fine for me to watch Jaws and, subsequently, most horror. Ben Gardner's head jumpscare got me good but it had nothing on this moment from Titanic. I really was ready.