When the audience is scarier than the movie

I challenged movie demographics the other night and ended up in teenage hell. It wasn’t so much the film, which was “The Ring,” but the audience. Ninety percent of it consisted of those between the ages of 13 and 16, and they were there to be heard.

It’s this way: My wife is out of town for a few days, and we have this deal that when she’s gone I can eat whatever I want and see every lousy movie around. So after fixing myself a delicious dinner of tuna and okra topped with ketchup, I hustled into Woodland Hills to see “The Ring.”

I’m kind of a scary-movie nut and will make an effort to take in the horror flick of the moment, even though I am advised against it by everyone I know with an IQ over 75. Cinelli aspires to a higher form of art and would rather spend eight hours at an auto-da-fe than two hours at my kind of movie.

But when she took off to see our daughter up north, I went to a theater at the mall. I should have known right away that I might be in for a new experience. The area was crawling with teenagers. Girls with their navels exposed. Boys with their trousers falling off. The noise was overwhelming and the sight disorienting.

At first, I was cowed by the calamitous display of pubescent disorder, glands exploding everywhere. But then I figured that God had put me there for a purpose. I would study teenage behavior the way anthropologist Margaret Mead had studied the mating habits of South Sea islanders. She wrote “Coming of Age in Samoa.” I could write “Coming of Age at the Mall.”

I wasn’t informed until later that “The Ring” was really for squirming, wiggling young people, not for mature, skeptical adults. The kids fit the intended demographics. I didn’t know much about the film except that it was supposed to be steeped in horror. I figured that meant a teenage girl left home alone without pizza. She runs screaming through the streets and is killed by a masked guy with a boat hook. The end.

“The Ring” is more complicated than that, although one is required to suspend disbelief in order to accept it. But if you can buy a talking mouse named Mickey, you can believe that a girl can return from the dead to indiscriminately murder everyone in sight.

Almost immediately upon entering the theater, I was startled by a sudden, earsplitting scream behind me, so shrill I almost dropped my hot dog. The first scream was followed by an answering scream, and out of nowhere, two teenage girls rushed together like sisters separated by a war.

I learned that evening that the screams are a traditional greeting among humans of that age and that gender. Even though they may have seen each other that day in school, the fact that they meet again unexpectedly requires a high squeal of recognition and then wild hugs. And there were many greetings that night.

Enter the boys. They came into the theater swaggering and bellowing like drunks at a football game. Had they been bare-chested with the name of the movie spray-painted across their bellies, I would not have been surprised.

The bellowing and the shouting, fueled by testosterone, reached a decibel level equal to departing jets. The purpose of their noise was quite obviously to attract the people who were screaming. I noticed that the girls didn’t scream at the boys but at each other, and the boys didn’t scream directly at the girls or even at each other, but just sort of bellowed upward, like a bull speared by picadors.

Another element of teenage behavior I noticed was that of continuous movement. I don’t know that any of you ever saw “The Snake Pit,” about conditions in what was known then as an insane asylum. There was an overhead shot that showed a bunch of the patients in a circular room, moving and pacing and muttering. The camera kept pulling back and back until they resembled snakes in a pit.

The teen movement at “The Ring” was similar. They were unable to sit still and unable to keep quiet even when the movie began. The noise was muted to some extent but the milling about never ceased. I don’t know what they did exactly, or even if they knew, but they’d go here and there and see someone they hadn’t seen and do something they’d never do at home.

After the movie, the screaming and bellowing began anew, but I had observed their behavior long enough, so I left while my sanity was still intact. I don’t recall that much about the movie. Oh, it was scary, all right, but not half as scary as being surrounded by -- shudder -- all of those raging hormones.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays in Calendar. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.