Editorials
Terror at the Multiplex: 9 Horror Films Set in a Movie Theater
The theatrical movie-going experience is like none other. The smell of popcorn that permeates the lobby, the previews, and the communal experience of seeing a movie on the big screen all make for a sorely missed activity right now. The theatrical slate might be a barren wasteland, and our favorite cinematic mecca shuttered for the time being, but that just means finding new ways to keep our passion for film well satiated. In other words, we miss going to the movies a whole lot right about now, so we’ve curated a special watch-list with our fave place in mind.
Here are nine horror movies that bring the fun and unleash terror upon the multiplex.
The Tingler
William Castle’s film might have earned a reputation for featuring one of his best gimmicks, in which he installed electric buzzers in some of the theater seats, but it’s strong enough to stand on its own. Vincent Price stars as a pathologist who discovers a parasitic creature that attaches to its host’s spine and feeds off their fear. The wife of movie theater owner Oliver Higgins falls victim to this parasite, the Tingler, which fuels most of the plot. The climax, of course, sees the Tingler let loose in Higgins’s theater.
The Blob
In the grand scheme of the plot, very little of the film takes place in the theater, and yet the scene is so iconic it warrants inclusion. Of course, it began with the original 1958 original, but this 1988 remake dials the scene up to eleven. Glorious practical effects, humor, carnage, and utter mayhem at an evening showing of a slasher film, no less. Theatrical perfection.
Fade to Black
Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher) is a lonely cinephile. By day he works at a film distributor’s warehouse, and he spends his nights at repertory film screenings. After being mistakenly stood up for a date, his obsession turns into psychosis, and he embarks on a murder spree. He incorporates his love of movies into each kill, making himself look like a classic film character before committing each murder. The finale takes place in one of the most iconic theaters of all: Mann’s Chinese Theatre.
Anguish
This trippy film-within-a-film concept sees a group of patrons getting terrorized in the theater where they’re currently watching a horror movie. That movie features a serial killing ophthalmologist’s assistant that brings his victims’ eyes back to his overbearing mother (Zelda Rubinstein). The dual stories create a surreal atmosphere. Perhaps more intriguing is that Anguish could never be made today; the film’s climax hits a little too close to modern reality.
Popcorn
A group of film students decides to put on an all-night horror marathon to raise funds for their university’s film department. They set up in an empty theater scheduled for demolition, and rig up numerous William Castle style gimmicks to commence throughout the evening to coincide with the movies playing. It’s a solid plan until a masked killer shows up and begins picking them off one by one, under the guise of horror movie fun. Starring Jill Schoelen and Dee Wallace, Popcorn brings serious slasher entertainment and retro cinematic adoration.
Coming Soon
From the writer behind Shutter, this theater-set horror movie follows an employee who makes money on the side selling movies he pirated at the theater. When he attempts to pirate an advanced copy of a horror movie set for theatrical release, spooky and strange things start happening around him. Like Ringu, Coming Soon features a cursed film that triggers during a specific scene. If you’re looking for vengeful ghosts and serious scares, give this a watch.
Nightmare Cinema
This horror anthology boasts five segments by Mick Garris, Joe Dante, David Slade, Alejandro Brugues, and Ryuhei Kitamura, offering up different styles and tones for every horror taste. All of these stories are connected by a wraparound, in which five strangers converge at an old theater and witness screenings showing their darkest fears and secrets. They’re curated by the Projectionist, played by Mickey Rourke.
Demons
The definitive theater-set horror movie. A large group of people invited to attend a screening of a mysterious horror movie quickly find themselves living in one when they’re locked inside with ravenous demons. A rocking soundtrack, ’80s energy, and a whole lot of gruesome demon fun under Lamberto Bava’s direction make for one hell of a good time at the movies. They will make cemeteries their cathedrals and the cities will be your tombs.
Porno
The newest film on the list, Fangoria’s Porno is now available for digital rentals that help support various independent theaters. This ’90s-set horror-comedy sees a group of employees at a local movie theater fighting for their lives when they accidentally summon a succubus. Gore, chaos and some severe penis trauma ensue (watch the NSFW trailer here).
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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