*Trailer guy voice* In a world where people talk through movie screenings with impunity, kick the back of your seat until the credits roll, and scatter popcorn like Batman’s mother’s pearls, one brave hero will stand up for us all to take them down. She is… The Theater Husher.
Or, to put it another way, TikTok user @blondeorphan aka Alyssa won the acclaim of filmgoers everywhere when she shared the moment she got her own back on a couple who ruined the movie for her. Alyssa was just trying to enjoy her screening of Longlegs but instead had to deal with these couple of wannabe critics who proceeded to sit directly behind her (despite the place being near empty) and then talk and kick their way through the whole experience. Pushed to the brink by the end, Alyssa offered them an Oscar-worthy slice of sass that finally shut them up.
“If you guys have no haters, I’m f***ing dead,” Alyssa said to the couple, before striding out of the theater like she was Nicole Kidman.
The killer exit line, the march out the theater with T-Rex’s “Bang a Gong” playing over the top, Alyssa’s footsteps perfectly timed to the beat… This is a moment worthy of happening in a movie, let alone happening in a movie theater. There’s even a beautifully timed comedic beat when the couple are stunned into silence for a second before one of them says, “… Huh?” We’ve always wanted to live out that scene in a film where the main character says something cool and then walks away with a banger playing on the soundtrack, but only Alyssa has made it a reality.
That’s not to say that Alyssa is the only person out there who likes to turn the tables on movie-ruiners, as the comments are full of hilarious and likely effective countermeasures. “I get up and sit behind them. Giggling until they move,” admitted one reverse-uno expert. Others think the direct approach is best: “This happened to me a couple weeks ago lol I turned around and asked ‘are you going to keep kicking my seat the whole time!’ Left her and her bf and their friends embarrassed.”
Some, meanwhile, think that when pettiness and aggression fail you, there’s always the full method route. “You say nothing, get up and sit right next to them never saying a single word,” suggested one out-of-the-box thinker. “Stare at them while the movie plays, the second they look at you, look away. Keep doing this all night, forget the movie.. they are your project now.”
It may actually take extreme measures like this to combat the rising tide of awful moviegoing etiquette. A September 2023 study found that poor cinema behavior was facing a troubling upward trend. As per Merchoid, 87% of people have encountered bad manners from others while seeing a film on the big screen. This is almost certainly putting a lot of people off the whole experience. As one comment put it, “This is why I don’t go to the movies anymore.”. And it’s all because of people like Alyssa’s enemies.
If they didn’t have any haters, they sure to do now — nearly 120,000 of them, going by the likes on Alyssa’s video.