Horror movies in Amity Park weren't the same as they used to be.

Originally they were no different to the horror movies in any old town, most of them sucked, but were still fun for a cheap scare, some of them were genuinely terrifying and had even the toughest of the tough clutching their friend's hand on the way home, and others were just a gory, badly acted adventure that you'd go see with a bunch of friends on Halloween for a bit of a laugh.

But after you've just spent the past hour hiding under the gum smeared underbelly of a Nasty Burger booth table holding your breath and knowing that the hand of a monster could drag you out straight through the metal surface at any given moment… an axe-toting guy in a mask jumping out onto the screen just didn't have the bite it once did.

People used to see horror movies to add a bit of spice to their average everyday lives, they were fun because they were something unimaginable, something that could never happen to you. It was all just a work of fiction to get your heart pumping and adrenaline surging, there weren't really monsters that could drag you out of bed in the night, there was nothing to really be frightened of.

But in Amity Park there was.

Amity Park was full of the most dangerous of creatures, ones that couldn't be stopped by locked doors or solid walls, weapons were essentially useless and your only saviours were a pair of incompetent ghost hunters and another ghost who the town couldn't seem to decide was a threat or an ally, and no one had any intention of being the one to find out if it were the former.

In this town ghostly possession happened on an almost weekly basis, in this town schools had drills for ghost attacks, in this town every person had a story to tell about electrical appliances randomly flying out their windows or Christmas trees mutating and destroying their homes. So watching a couple of dumb saps blunder through a cemetery at midnight wasn't the most enticing piece of cinema for the average Amity Park citizen, especially when simply walking down the street in the middle of the day was just as nerve wracking.

For a lot of people horror movies seemed to do nothing but trigger unpleasant memories. Perhaps of that time a ghost nearly dropped them from a three storey building, or that whole day they'd spent overshadowed and only realised after waking up in a parking lot at an ungodly hour of the morning with no idea how they'd gotten there.

People really didn't take well to demonic possession based movies any more. It was a rather sensitive subject.

Even the people who hadn't had any scarring personal experiences with ghosts couldn't find amusement in these films any more. Simply because they were just so boring.

"Ooooh a door closed on it's own."

"GASP! Something fell off a table. How spooky."

"What's that? Your house is haunted? How cute. Call me when it's your whole freaking TOWN."

"Did they just beat that ghost with salt? SALT? I FUCKING WISH IT WERE THAT EASY GOD."

So when Halloween rolled around and all the horror flicks were premiering in full force were the cinemas left empty?

Nope.

Because if there was one thing the town of Amity Park had learned to do, it was adapt. So when the local cinema found itself running low on business in the month of October they thought, well, let's see what we can do about that.

So with a crazy marketing plan and a heavy dose of humour, they turned every horror movie into a god damn gimmick, Amity Theatre's Interactive Halloween Extravaganza!

Audiences could heckle the movie characters as loudly as they wanted, they would be given packets of foam toys to throw at the screen at key moments, they were encouraged to 'booooo' during bad dialogue and to cheer obnoxiously loud at inappropriate moments. Sometimes on opening nights the movies would be stopped before a big reveal and an employee would get up and take 'bets' on what was going to happen next, the winner would receive a free gift voucher.

The whole scheme was a roaring success.

Even if the movies were terrible or boring or ridiculous, people just couldn't resist the opportunity to go see a horror film in a cinema that would allow them to actively yell at the characters and throw things at the screen. They all enjoyed making a mockery of the genre that wouldn't know a real ghost if it overshadowed them and made them do the chicken dance in their underwear.

For once the people of Amity Park could find monsters funny. Could find ghosts funny.

Even if it was just for one month a year.