Sometimes all people in an audience want is to be wanted, even when they're not. They get desperate to stop minding their own business and start minding a movie's instead. For instance, when a teenage girl's been snatched from a mall parking lot and thrown into a trunk, then comes this close to being rescued by a stranger, some people in the audience think that girl needs some encouragement. So they yell to her: "Scream, bitch. Scream!" Even after a cut to the inside of the truck reveals that the girl's abductor is ready to impale her cheek with a screwdriver were she to scream, some people in the audience need her to take that risk anyway.

God willing, every audience for The Call will have that person who thinks he's just on the phone with a friend or stuck in traffic or totally by himself in the theater. They don't make enough thrillers like this anymore, ones you can talk to, ones that, uncannily enough, seem to listen. The night I saw the movie, when one character drops a phone about 15 feet into a shaft, someone in the audience said, "Damn, I would have to go down there and get that." And down into the shaft the character went.