This week, the Internet exploded after an AMC executive suggested that the movie theater chain might allow its patrons to text in some theaters. Deep thoughts and hysteria over the concept spread throughout social media circles, but AMC quickly squashed their initial suggestion. “With your advice in hand, there will be NO TEXTING ALLOWED in any of the auditoriums at AMC Theatres. Not today, not tomorrow and not in the foreseeable future,” the company responded. We decided to go back to the source itself, movies, and revisit some of cinema’s best movie theater scenes from hell to remind ourselves what complete chaos at the theater might look like.
If only there were an amoeba-like biological weapon created by the government to attack noisy movie patrons when they text and talk during a film.
When a young woman searches for her missing father, she winds up in a strange seaside town where the residents seem to be members of a cult, hypnotized by the blood moon. In one of Messiah of Evil‘s most memorable scenes, a young woman finds herself surrounded by the creepy townies in a movie theater before being eaten alive.
This film-within-a-film scene in Wes Craven’s Scream 2 finds Jada Pinkett Smith’s character being brutally stabbed, but the murder is mistaken for a publicity stunt — which is something that, scarily enough, doesn’t seem all that outlandish in 2016.
Robert De Niro’s Max Cady is the ultimate bad moviegoer in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear remake, which was parodied lovingly by The Simpsons.
The 1991 cult horror favorite Popcorn, which is set during a horrorthon film screening, posits what atrocities might happen when the gimmicks a movie theater plays up for its audience turn against them.
An American Werewolf in London
This is what talking to a corpse in a London porn theater looks like. John Landis’ 1981 film finds an American backpacker haunted by his dead best friend after being attacked by a wolf.
This is what you get for watching movies with Hitler and Goebbels.
Do not expose to sunlight, don’t get wet, and never feed after midnight. These are the rules of Joe Dante’s creature comedy Gremlins. The troublemaking critters go full-on deranged during a screening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which leads to an explosive finale.
If your nightmare is to become trapped inside a movie theater with annoying texters and talkers, Lamberto Bava’s 1985 film Demons takes your worst-case scenario and turns the overly chatty patrons into ravenous demons.