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The familiar and taken for granted delights of being able to visit cinema buildings at will came to an abrupt and dramatic cessation in the UK on the 20 March 2020 in the lead up to the government's first coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown (Kanter, 2020). As many cinemas subsequently decided to mothball their operations, after brief attempts at reopening under required safety conditions during brief lockdown breaks, the precarity for workers in the film exhibition sector became increasingly visible, with many staff laid off while the cinema buildings remained closed. Alongside this, news footage of near-deserted urban spaces during lockdown presented eerie images of depopulated environments denied their intended users, as if they were scenes from dystopian science fiction films but now our everyday reality. Thus the previously familiar became extremely strange and uncanny almost overnight. Anthony Vidler, in his classic study The Architectural Uncanny, usefully remarks that:
As a concept, then, the uncanny has, not unnaturally, found its metaphorical home in architecture: first in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror, and then in the city, where what was once walled and intimate, the confirmation of community—one thinks of Rousseau's Geneva —has been rendered strange by the spatial incursions of modernity. In both cases, of course, the “uncanny” is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming. (Vidler, 1992: 11)
In this article I wish to address what I regard as the fundamental, yet often unnoticed, uncanniness of the cinema experience, located within those places where we go specifically to become immer