Before the movie started, a "History of Michael Myers" mini documentary played, because the best way to hype an audience up for the first film in a series is revealing copious footage from the later films. Edited together like the Halloween series had fucked the editor's girlfriend's titties, it was a slapdash appraisal of 10 movies that no one wanted. By the time the actual film played, the sense of anticipation in the room had been deflated. If they had wanted to see the fifth guy who played Michael Myers talk about how challenging it was to accept the iconic role and how Halloween will still frighten everyone who stumbles across it today, they would've been scrolling through DVD special features. And the movie was never able to regain its momentum.

Dimension Films
Which actually makes it a meta-commentary for the franchise itself.

The audience responded to Halloween in the same way that one would watch improvised jazz for the first time. They shyly smiled and nodded along, and there was a mutual recognition of, "Yeah, this is great stuff, and I respect it, but, uhhhhh, yeah." Halloween has long been declawed due to a thousand hours' worth of film history where the killer is also hiding in the dark. At the end of the showing, a man tried to get a clap going, but he stopped when he realized that the balloon of enthusiasm had been popped. Halloween had been propped up for years as one of the scariest movies ever made, and seeing it with an unimpressed audience turned it into just a well-made one.

Dimension Films
"Sorry, man. Can't fuck titties with a half-chub."

With Halloween, there was a feeling of "This is a classic movie, dammit! You should dig it even if you hate it." Made just four years later, The Thing gave off no such vibes. It's much harder to duplicate the Oh Shitness of The Thing, and unlike a majority of modern horror effects, where a computer-generated monster dismembers a computer-generated man and no one is affected because it's computers, The Thing is cool to look at. Also, the day we start feeling empathy for computer men is the day that we let the nerds win.

Universal Studios
Pity? Maybe. Empathy? Never.

As I've written about before, The Thing has a certain visceral look to it that makes every death scene a thesis on how lackluster it is to have a body that stays in a consistent shape. Chests turn into giant maws, dogs become dog-related death mounds, and heads detach themselves from bodies and crawl away. Anything is possible in The Thing's universe as long as you truly accept that flesh can rip that way. The Thing is all about believing in yourself and trusting that, with hard work and a little luck, you too can be invaded by an alien and surprise your co-workers with your new nightmare form.

Universal Studios
Sadly, having hair/beard game as good as prime Kurt Russell will always be out of reach, though.

I have seen two reactions in movie theaters that I'd regard with the adjective "thunderous." The first was when The Joker did his "pencil trick" in The Dark Knight, and I thought that the audience would carry away whatever are the movie theater equivalent of goal posts. The second was during The Thing, when the aforementioned head pulled so hard that it came off its former owner's neck, grew spider legs and antennae, and scuttled away. There were some screams, but mostly it was met with generous approval. People clapped and cheered, because this is what life was all about:

Universal Studios
The sheer ecstasy of getting to see that former skull/current crab enlarged to 60 feet wide,
surrounded by people who feel the exact same way that you do.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is barely a movie. There are no pauses that allow audiences to put two and two together, and even when potential revelations are made, they're accompanied by ceaseless screaming and a soundtrack that sounds like someone attacking an orchestra with a hammer. It's a weird, creaking carnival ride that feels like it's about to break apart and sling you off into the cotton candy and toothless barker stand at any moment. You can compare it to other movies, but the thing that it most aptly resembles is being trapped in a sweaty, revolving cart while "Freebird" blares at you through speakers that should've been replaced 20 years ago. It's a grating, impossibly timed piece of celluloid.

Lionsgate Films
And I love it.

And so did a good third of the people that sat beside me when I saw it. There is a cult of Chain Saw that can barely be replicated by any other movie. It is to horror fans what Jimi Hendrix and Pulp Fiction posters are to your freshman year roommate who just had the best, most interesting, hilarious moment, bro, while being high for the second time: a monument dedicated to everything they stand for. They know every detail of its creation and will eagerly present their Leatherface tattoos as a defense mechanism against predators who don't wear T-shirts with pictures of masked cannibals on them.

Another third of the audience seemed disgusted. The guy beside me kept whispering, "What the fuck?" whenever he saw a piece of furniture made out of something that a person uses to wave. There is nary a couch or table in Chain Saw that didn't used to be a handshake, so "What the fuck?" became a musical cue to inform me that something awful had already happened. When it was over, a woman stood up, said, "That was sick," and then immediately tripped in her aisle, because the world solely exists to laugh at us until we die.

Lionsgate Films

The last third of the audience exploded out of the theater to tell their friends that they didn't find it that scary. There was an intense fervor to these personal declarations of fortitude. It wasn't just an "I wasn't scared!" that you'd use to hint to your unfortunate date that your genitals are intact, fearless, and functional. It was them proving themselves able to sit through Chain Saw's fabled roller coaster of an experience and come out unscathed and with all of their pieces not yet turned into a chair.

As a 25-year-old who recently texted his girlfriend "5 DVDs/Blu-rays at this gas station for $10? So pumped," I am not the gatekeeper for what's "cool." But there is nothing less cool than basically telling everyone sitting around you that you have nothing witty to say but would still like to be seen as better than the movie that a whole room paid to watch. The most fascinating thing that has happened to me in the last week was that I farted and it sounded like my butthole was saying, "I don't know," and I will never be as uncool as the dude who stage-whispered, "REALLY?" during a public showing of Freaks, and then smacked at his forehead with his palm.

When you take a movie like Godzilla deadly seriously and you put it in front of people who don't feel the same way, you're bound to be disappointed. That film has had its reputation stretched over the years by repeated cries of, "It's a metaphor for Hiroshima and is NOT to be taken lightly, heathens." And it's that. It's definitely that. But it's also a movie about a guy wearing a dinosaur costume, kicking around miniatures. The two can be reconciled without it being blasphemous.

The 180-degree turn when Godzilla finally gets up on the beach and brings the ruckus was fun to witness, as suddenly we all managed to "Kumbaya" for the first time in an hour. There's something simple and beautiful about '50s monster rampages that turns what could be an ironic appreciation into a sincere one, as long as you're not eager to constantly point out the wires showing.