AVQ&A: What's your most visceral experience at the movie theater?

It was June 2004, Ken Jennings was beginning his ascent to the top of Jeopardy!, Ronald Reagan was heading to the grave, and I was having a minor panic attack at a midnight screening of Spider-Man 2. As we know, the movie didn’t disappoint, and, in my memory, the riotous crowd was swinging (and cheering) with the film’s every thwip, punch, and joke. Meanwhile, either my adrenaline was charging from seeing my hero, Spider-Man, wallop Doctor Octopus, or my blood sugar was crashing from too much Coca-Cola, because my heart was racing and everything below my lower jaw went numb. Then, after the breathless subway sequence, as MJ and Peter kiss, and alarms ring in the distance, she shrugs and says, “Go get ’em, tiger.” The audience popped so loudly that it sounded like the movie had won the Super Bowl. My heart pounded, my face ached, and the adrenaline surged. I’ve only had a similar experience one other time since: Two days later, when I saw the movie a second time. [Matt Schimkowitz]

An occupational hazard of watching tons of movies is that you learn the rhythms and patterns of different genres so that conventional set-ups and payoffs have diminishing returns. That especially affects horror films. I’m no hardened cynic, but I can smell a jumpscare coming a mile away. That makes the effect The Babadook had on me all the more impressive. As scary as it is smart, The Babadook was already buzzy by the time I got to it at a frigid December midnight screening, alone, in the godforsaken ghost town of late-night Oklahoma City. My heart was pounding throughout the screening, but I didn’t realize how deeply it got under my skin until I had to walk back to my car from the theater. Every shadow, every can rattling down the street—I was freaked. And then I climbed into my car, forgetting about the black peacoat I had hanging in the backseat. Yeesh. [Jacob Oller]

Sometimes you see a good movie at a particularly volatile moment, and that’s precisely what Greta Gerwig’s take on Little Women was for me. I was less than a year out from college and doing typical fresh-out-of-college things (read: not much). At the time, I was living in Chicago not far from the Music Box Theatre, and my visits there were regularly the highlight of my week. But it was Little Women that stands out the most as the movie that winter that completely knocked me on my ass. It wasn’t Beth’s death or Jo and Laurie realizing it would never work between them, but Meg’s wedding when the surviving sisters realized that childhood really was over that really got to me at the time. Seeing it in such a beautiful space, and the way the following year shook out, only did more to cement it in my mind as one of my most powerful theater experiences. [Drew Gillis]

The word in the summer of ’93 was that Steven Spielberg wouldn’t allow his own kids to watch this thing, which was all my friends and I needed to hear to know that we were absolutely going to sneak into it. I was 10 and a fan of Jaws, a staple on family vacations. And from the jump, Jurassic Park felt like that to me, killing off that poor gatekeeper without showing (much of) the Velociraptor and leaving a lot to the imagination. That sequence that really left a mark, of course, was the brilliant unveiling of the T. rex, which built tension with those widely-spaced footstep booms before the situation became chaotic and hellish: Ariana Richards’ Lex screaming while trapped under the jeep was the stuff of nightmares—but the moment we kept talking about at Taco Bell afterward was the final one of Martin Ferrero’s “blood-sucking lawyer” on the john. [Tim Lowery]

I have a complicated relationship with grief and movies, and it sneaks up on me in unexpected moments. Take the time, in 2019, when I found myself unexpectedly bawling in a movie theater full of children in the middle of Frozen 2. I barely remember the movie’s plot, save one part: Kristen Bell’s Anna, believing her beloved sister is dead, collapses into darkness. The song that follows, “The Next Right Thing,” absolutely harrowed me: Informed (I later learned) by co-director Chris Buck’s grief over the death of his son, it laid out, in a way I’d never heard a movie do before, so many things I’d learned about the horror of being the person who survives—and the ways you inevitably have to get back on your feet, no matter what. I don’t know how it landed for the kids in the audience, honestly; I was too busy trying to choke down the sobs. [William Hughes]

I didn’t know anything about Whiplash going into the theater; it had been described to me simply as a drama about a jazz drummer, and to say I was grumbling and dragging my feet and casting about for literally any other entertainment option would be putting it mildly. But it was a family outing and there was simply no way out of it, so I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to suffer through it. At least I’ll get some fancy artisanal indie-theater popcorn as a consolation, I told myself. I was absolutely not prepared for the visceral exercise in sustained tension that played out in front of me over the next hour and a half; all I could do was dig my fingers into the armrest like it was the safety bar on a rollercoaster and compulsively shovel that delicious popcorn into my mouth. To this day, no other movie has made me nearly as anxious as Whiplash. [Jen Lennon]