In the first season finale of LOST, Kate, Jack, and Locke are walking through the jungle with the dynamite, and then they see a string of black smoke making mechanical noises pass by them. This is one of my all-time favourite moments in television, and it blew my tiny mind the first time I saw it. One of my favourite feelings in fiction is having reality pulled from under me; LOST didn’t just aim for that, it was almost the whole reason it existed, and the Smoke Monster (as he came to be known) is the most powerful expression of that even before we ever saw him. He’s one of the most potent works of imagination ever just from a design standpoint; apparently, the mechanical sound is lifted from a taxi meter, but I always thought it sounded like chains being pulled. Both that and the eerie hum are simultaneously disturbing and weirdly satisfying noises to listen to, and combining that with the smoke effect provokes one into confusion.

Having that thing just casually strolling by with no warning was wrong-footing, to say the least. I don’t think anything in fiction has ever caught me that off-guard again.

Back in 2008, me and my closest friends went to see The Dark Knight at the cinema. My best friend wound up seeing it about a dozen times over that month, not once paying for it – he was pulled into seeing it with about a dozen different friend groups. When we came out of the cinema, we were hyped up by the experience; our favourite part was William Fitchner’s scene, because none of us expected a random bystander to suddenly become a Bad Motherfucker like that. We were so hyped up that we decided to go in and watch another movie, which then turned into a third movie because we were having so much fun. These are the good days in life.

For a short time when I was twenty-two, I was living in a small room in an unfamiliar city, working a night job in a potato cake factory. I was deeply depressed, getting very inconsistent sleep, and had almost no human contact for about three months straight. It was during this time that I bought a copy of Spec Ops: The Line, and I played through the entire thing in the course of a single night. There was something cathartic about playing out someone else’s mental breakdown when I was in that state of mind; the game has its protagonist literally descending as he metaphorically descends into madness, and it felt nice to overly commit to a violently terrible idea alongside him. However horrifying the consequences of tragedy are, they’re a lot better than feeling inconsequential.

What are your favourite viewing experiences – times when the way you watched something was as important or maybe more important than the thing you were watching?