A movie theater is a rich setting for horror. While strangers gather there to see the same show, they resolutely remain strangers to each other, setting themselves apart with their singularly fussy expectations for everyone else to behave. Don’t talk. Stop texting. Don’t laugh. Stop picking. Don’t chew.
And, for chrissakes, stop humping! Do you know where those seats have been?
Having run a movie theater for a spell, I most certainly do. You do not want to know what I know.
Has the battle over moviegoing decorum really changed over time? Talking or texting, necking your date or bear-pawing the popcorn, incessant complaints about other people’s rudeness are just the retold gripes of a timeless moviegoer who is annoyed by everyone else.
But in 1939, Graham Greene saw the fight for moviegoing civility for what it was and gave it a devious twist. “A Little Place off the Edgware Road” offers a chilling take on the in-theater disturbance. As a recovering theater employee, I can confirm that Greene is dead accurate in imagining just how mentally unpleasant things can get.
“Edgware Road” is gothic nightmare come alive, offering “particularly fine example of the shadowy ground between the barely explicable and the completely unhinged,” says editor Greg Buzwell. He collected this short story in Mortal Echoes: Encounters with the End (2019), one of the great books of the British Library’s “Tales of the Weird” series.
Greene’s story is simple. A fussy, tired man named Craven seeks respite in a dying theater on Edgware Road, where silent pictures are playing but barely hanging on. “The primitives” weren’t fashionable in 1939 London, and neither were the theater’s less-than-20 scattered patrons. A stranger sits down next to Craven.
Somebody felt his way through the darkness, scrabbling past Craven’s knees—a small man: Craven experienced the unpleasant feeling of a large beard brushing his mouth.
The stranger then blathers on and on about the on-screen murder not being true to life. So sure of himself. Why does he care? Is he mad? There’s spittle landing where it shouldn’t. The stranger’s hand even touches Craven’s at one point, leaving a sticky residue. What the hell is this guy’s problem? Whatever it is, it’s big.
In terms of capturing the essence of a disgusting encounter, Greene’s storytelling has it all. It features exacting tactile detail of what it feels like to have one’s personal space invaded and sullied. The reader’s sense of panic rises in lockstep with Craven’s growing umbrage. The emotional effect of “Edgware Road” hits hard because it is built around a common experience of being too close to someone who needs to JUST GO AWAY.
And just who the stranger turns out to be? I won’t reveal. Greene’s story is fully capable of delivering that surprise itself. But I will add that the story works spectacularly because the uncanny encounter is both deeply familiar and so very strangely told. The guy’s beard actually touched Craven’s face? That’s nasty. (And it gets worse.)
So, did I witness anything as horrible as Greene imagined during my movie theater days? There were buckets of vomit during those six-plus years. A teenager once yakked in a trash can when the lobby was full. There were run-of-the-mill drunk-and-disorderlies who left behind overflowing plastic-bottle spittoons. My basement office filled with sewage. Twice.
Yet, I endured my most horrible moment when a half-full theater was watching a Holocaust drama. I think I was there to facilitate a post-screening Q&A. During one of the movie’s most wrenching scenes, a deejay hosting a big party on the floor above us cranked up the bass, drowning out the movie’s sorrowful score with repeated Hey, Macarena, ay-yays! Fun apologies, those were.
I struggled to maintain movie-theater law and order, suffering my fair share of failed encounters with bad behavior. But none was as wickedly rendered—and cathartic!—as Greene’s.