Eleanor Johnson

“When you’re reading a book or viewing a sculpture at a museum, you’re doing it, in effect, alone. Nowadays, when we watch movies, we often stream them in our homes, also alone. But in the 1970s, when the films that are central to this book were released, when people watched films, they watched them together, in a pop-up community of filmgoers at a movie theater. When you watch a film in the theater, and you see someone next to you crying, it affects you. And when you watch a horror film in the theater, when you hear everyone around you screaming or groaning, or see them jumping around in their seats, that affects you, too. Cinema has an amplifying effect on affect, on emotion, on an audience’s empathy with the main characters on the screen.”
― Eleanor Johnson, Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism, 1968-1980