If You Take Snacks to 'A Quiet Place,' Everyone Is Going to Hate You

I consider myself to be a pretty measured person, one who isn’t prone to accusatory outbursts or thoughts of violence, but that was before I spent almost two hours listening to someone CRUNCH EIGHT THOUSAND PIECES OF ICE during a screening of A Quiet Place. He has no idea how close he came to taking part in my first arrest for assault—and I would’ve knocked the Goobers out of everyone else’s hands as the cops marched me out of the theater.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that it’s impossible to snack during that particular flick, which stars John Krasinski (who also directed), Emily Blunt, and some blind Demogorgon-ish monsters who track and find their prey based on the sounds they make. There is very little dialogue in the film, and a sparse, intermittent score, which means that every sound the audience makes is amplified to an uncomfortable level. (In one early scene, the shelves of an abandoned store are empty except for the bags of chips, which would’ve been the last meal that anyone ate near one of those creatures).

In the days since A Quiet Place opened, Twitter has been filled with both the people who either cataloged every individual Reese’s Piece that their seatmates ate and the ones who regretted stopping at the concession stand before the show. “ A Quiet Place,” one moviegoer tweeted. “Or ‘ How Self-Conscious Can We Make You About Every Tiny Sound You Make in A Movie Theater with 100 Strangers All Trying to Eat Popcorn At the Same Time?’”

After having his own experience of A Quiet Place interrupted by candy wrappers, Nick Grimshaw, the host of BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show, suggested that theaters need to take desperate measures for future screenings. “I know we like snacks in the cinema and that’s 50 percent of the reason in going, but in this film, you can’t have snacks,” he said. “You can’t make any noise. I think the cinema needs to ban snacks from this movie. If you’re going to see […] any other film, snack away, but you can’t in this film.”

Grimshaw said that he did get a bag of popcorn but instead of chewing it, he “sucked [it] until it melted.” If you’re going this weekend, that’s one option. Another is to take what one Twitter user suggested as the only acceptable snack: “a cloth bag of loose gummy worms.”

And don’t even think about crunching your ice. I might see it again.