About one year ago, which roughly translates to sixteen millennia factoring in The Absolute Roaring Asshole that was 2020, I wrote about the ways in which violent slasher films became my safe space during quarantine. Instead of speaking to a licensed therapist, I simply took to the internet and pondered the reasons why the sight of Jason Voorhees machete-chopping horny youths to pieces was soothing as the world outside succumbed to strife and sickness, eventually coming to a pretty evergreen conclusion. The horror genre is inseparable from the idea of catharsis; you pop on a scary flick, elevate those heart levels to appropriately fighty-or-flighty levels, and when the credits roll it's pure release, body and mind. It's the safest way to survive an ordeal, and usually, the experience is communal. But in quarantine, it's more like building a muscle through repetition. It was perseverance 101. It was finding comfort in the continued company of monsters. And it's an idea I keep returning to now, 365+ days of pure fuckery later, two shots of Pfizer delivered into my arm with all the grace of Skeet Ulrich giving Matthew Lillard an alibi in Scream, and theaters slowly but surely welcoming audiences safely back. Lo and behold, what's waiting for them is, primarily, horror movies. It's perfect. It's screamingly, violently perfect.
Despite Tenet's too-soon sad trombone declaration that "big movies are back in theaters," the first inkling that the theater experience was actually coming out of its coma was Godzilla vs. Kong's $435 million worldwide, not a horror movie, per se, but one deeply-rooted in horror history, and one that nevertheless uses monstrous destruction to tell its tale. (Two superpowered titans putting aside their ideological differences to take on a much scarier, seemingly unstoppable force? Interesting.) Things really started picking up as vaccine distribution smoothed out its wrinkles, coinciding with the franchise that, ironically, once sent audiences into the syringe pit: Spiral: From the Book of Saw debuted in May and held the top of the box office for weeks, pulling the Saw franchise over the billion-dollar line in the process. In yet another grand act of delicious irony, the second the box office starting making noise again, A Quiet Place Part II arrived to absolutely obliterate it, finishing its Memorial Day Weekend around the $59 million mark. As of this writing, anyone who felt okay seeing those bloody affairs in a theater could return this very weekend for another dose of chills and thrills, as The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It hits screens.
Of course, feeling okay to return at all is the first and arguably scariest leap.
Something I emerged from quarantine with, besides an unhealthy amount of The Guest watches logged to my Letterboxd and probably a side of PTSD, is an increased earnestness toward the things I love. I used to worry about romanticizing the theatrical experience too much but man, no, it's a special thing, crinkling bags and mid-movie Instagrammers included. Even pre-pandemic, the lights dimming on a packed house was a singular feeling; you can't bottle what it's like for a room of people, sitting beneath towering technicolor, sharing an emotion, be it a laugh, a scream, or just undivided attention. Post-pandemic? Damn near a religious experience. A table of food after a 20-mile walk through the desert, no mirage. Because what we missed wasn't just the movie, it was the human connection you simply don't get on your couch.
That glorious human connection is also the reason why returning to movie theaters feels deeply, profoundly strange. After more than a year away, we are simply not ready for the level of person-to-person emotional mind-meld the theatrical experience provides. We're not ready for human interaction, period. My first time back at a theater, an employee took a temperature check at the door and I said "you're welcome." Why did I say that? Impossible to say. At its best, your first few trips back to the theater are that level of awkward; at worst, it's terrifying. Being trapped inside our homes to offset the chances of sneezing invisible death toward our grandparents for a full year isn't something we just emerge from; we're all scarred in ways we'll still be reckoning with years down the line. But you'll feel it, indescribable but unmistakable in equal measure, as you sink into the theater seats. Underneath the excitement, you think about the air; you mentally measure the distance between you and the nearest person; you react to a stifled cough like it's the word "fire."
Which is why horror is the key to the return. It's my mid-pandemic slasher marathon on a communal scale. Horror films feed that fear back to us in safe doses, a controlled, concentrated hit of the anxiety we're already feeling. Horror is the theatrical experience's great emotional equalizer. Nearly all of my favorite movie theater moments, the ones that so often returned to me randomly over the course of quarantine, are linked to horror, because horror itself is linked to the human experience. Seeing Signs during a summer Jersey storm and feeling an entire auditorium of people levitate as the first appearance of the aliens synched up with a thundercrack outside. Driving 90 minutes to the nearest limited showing of Paranormal Activity in a full van because we'd all heard the word of mouth about its potential to terrify. The sound of 250 people simultaneously inhaling at the sight of a cop car in the final moments of Get Out, followed by an ear-shattering, rock-concert-as-hell reaction to the word "Airport" written on the driver's side door. All of it, like most of my thoughts, underscored by the voice of John Goodman, but in this particular case, it's the moment in Joe Dante's Matinee where he explains why stories about monsters have been synonymous with human recovery since the very beginning.
"You make the teeth as big as you want," he says, "then you kill it off. Everything's okay, the lights come up..."
And then he sighs deeply, a satisfied sound I feel in my freaking soul at the thought of watching Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga scream at demons for two hours in the same room as roughly 50-100 strangers. We lived—and continue to live, get the vaccine!—through a period where it seemed as if the lights would never come up, where the teeth looked pretty goddamn big indeed. As always, the movies won't save us completely. But it's just so comforting to finally be afraid, together, of something that can't hurt us.