Last time on True Fear, I showed you the ghost hand in our photo.
Seriously, look right here, it's actually there!
So if you haven't seen that episode and want to hear more about that… pop on over there.
But on today's episode, it's Independence Day here in America, the land of the…
Americans.
And if you're part of the 32.1% of my audience that is not from USA, then perhaps you've
heard of the 1996 blockbuster starring Will Smith.
If you haven't, I highly recommend that you give that one a watch, but I can't say the
same for the sequel that came out 20 years later.
In fact, the only entertaining part of that moviegoing experience was what went down in
the theater that evening.
So being fans of the original, Claude Gnome and I made plans to go see this new Independence
Day movie.
It wasn't like right when the movie came out or anything and I think we saw it late on
a weekday, so there were some people in the theater, but it wasn't packed.
There was also some remodeling going on in that theater at the time, so I think that
also helped keep the crowds down a bit.
At this particular cinema, they have big recliners, so it's not super high capacity anyways.
We were in the second row from the back, basically in the middle of the screen.
There were some couples scattered around in front of us, a family who was in our row all
the way to the left, one guy in the row behind us in the right corner, and a group of people
who were also in that back row over in the left corner.
The movie starts and about five or ten minutes in, the man sitting by himself in the back-right
starts talking on the phone.
I don't remember what he was talking about, but the only reason I didn't say something
right away was that there wasn't anything interesting going on in the movie, this guy
was just slightly more entertaining than what was happening on the screen.
I also figured that he'd be off the phone soon, before we got to any worthwhile scenes,
so I just kind of tuned it out for a while.
Let's just say that I'm glad that I did.
A couple minutes later, the guy is STILL blabbering, and that's when I've decided that enough is
enough.
I'm going to get up and call this guy out and tell him, "hey, shut up, we're trying
to watch the movie."
Then literally as I turn to go confront this guy, I hear someone from across the theater
yell out at him.
The first thing the phone guy does is make his way across the row over to the people
who yelled at him.
My first impression was that they actually knew each other, like they were supposed to
meet there or something and the phone guy was going over there to say hi.
And then even when they started yelling at each other, I was just thinking that it was
the type of thing where they were buddies and they were just giving each other a hard
time.
What happened next was what started to make me get worried.
First, the yelling escalates, and then the guys start pushing each other around.
Then the woman from the family in front of them gets up and starts hollering at them,
telling them to "knock it off" and "stop that right now".
This causes the group that was fighting in the back to start getting into with her and
her husband.
At this point the commotion is completely drowning out the movie.
I think we probably would have fared fine in a brawl, but the scary part was when I
turned and saw one of the couples in front of us quickly get up and speed out of the
theater, because this made me think that they had some reason to be afraid, despite being
pretty far away from where the fight was taking place.
The first thing that came to my head is that they were trying to escape because someone
up there had a gun, and after what took place in Colorado in 2012, and after the increasing
amount of shootings taking place in this country since that incident, the idea of something
happening here was actually pretty scary.
These people seemed like pretty shady characters as well, and if someone is dumb enough to
start a fight in a movie theater, who knows if they are also stupid enough to carry a
weapon into one.
And I think part of what started to make that possibility scary as the situation continued
to escalate is the way that they were acting, which was clearly outside of the social normal,
and the way they were dressed, which was, without a more eloquent way of explaining:
they were lookin' pretty thug.
And I'm not saying that everyone who follows those fashion trends is a dangerous criminal
or anything.
I think that makes about as much sense as when people see me always wearing black and
assume that means I'm sad or something.
But in the end I think it's just something that contributed to us feeling nervous about
the situation.
And Claude Gnome would later tell me that he felt the way about it.
However, we paid like 14 bucks to get into that movie, and that's before you even factor
in the cost of parking, so we were gonna stick that one out no matter how bad the movie was,
no matter how obnoxious the other audience members were, no matter how beaten and bruised
we were at risk of becoming by entering this brawl, and no matter how likely it was that
we would be shot and killed before this movie let out, so we stood our ground.
So eventually the lady who was yelling at them to stop… and hold on, can we pause
for a second?
Why is it that whenever you see videos of a fight, or just some kind of commotion in
general that there always some annoying lady yelling out about how wrong this is?
How disgusted she is?
How we all just need to stop and think of the children?
It just seems like that lady is always there.
Ok…
Time in.
So the lady takes her family and storms out the cinema.
I'm not sure if she threatened to report them to all to the management or something, as
I couldn't really make out all that was being said, but this is what kind of triggered them
to start moving the fight towards the exits, and they ended up duking it out down the aisle
until eventually one of them made a run for it across the width of the theater and out
of our auditorium, so that was kind of a relief, but at the same time it was the end of that
evening's entertainment…
Or so we thought…
You would probably expect that after being in an incident like that, the hoodlums would
book it, and get out of there before the police showed up.
I'm not exactly sure how long had passed before the three who started the confrontation come
marching back into the theater.
Not long after that, the original phone guy comes back in and stands at the exit, just
staring into the auditorium.
That's where I was thinking, "This is it.
This is where he comes back with his 48-caliber and shoots us all down."
He even had his hand in his pocket, and of course he was blocking the only exits.
So then he comes after the people who he had gotten into it with and they start going at
it some more!
I don't really have any idea what was said that made this fight so personal that they
still had beef after things had pretty much already cooled down, and after discussing
it later, neither of us were able to fully understand the situation.
Eventually, after a few more people had fled the room, they chased the guy out of there
again and followed him out into the lobby.
I wish I could have seen what happened out there, but I also didn't want to make it obvious
that I was watching, and risk getting myself involved in it.
So we were left with just a couple of other moviegoers by the time this had all died down.
We can only assume that someone who had left has reported the incident at some point.
What was surprising to me is that nobody ever came back into the theater, except for one
employee who came with a flashlight and collected something that was left behind.
The three goons who had called out the guy on his phone had left their jackets, so
I guess they had the employee guy go collect them before they they left or got kicked out.
Nobody was questioned about the incident and as far as I know, the police never showed
up.
We were not offered a refund, but I'm not sure if the same held true for the people
who left, and possibly complained.
I was most surprised that the one family who was sitting down the row from us never returned,
because it seemed like they would just go get the management and come back.
They also left all of their snacks and stuff behind, some of which were unopened.
It made me think that something might have happened to one of them out there, or they
honestly got really scared and just fled the entire place and never looked back.
We enjoyed their unopened snacks at the end as a consolation prize for having sat through
that movie, but we never found out the whole story of exactly what happened that made the
situation so violent.
The scariest thing to me, looking back on it, is that it easily could have been me who
ended up in the fight, had those other people not spoken before I did.
The other thing that was kind of haunting was not knowing what took place outside the
auditorium, or why none of those other people ever returned…
Surprisingly enough, this wasn't the only scary occurrence that I've experienced inside
of a cinema, so join me next time on True Fear, when I tell the story of what happened
when I went to go see Stephen King's most underappreciated movie, 1408.
Remember to subscribe to CZsWorld, for new horrors every week, punch that deathbell for
notifications and I'll see you in the next one.
Assuming we both survive.
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