Valentine's Nightmare at the Cinema

For Valentine's Day, a company books a small private theater as a perk for its single employees: an all-night slasher marathon. Lily Brooks, unattached and fond of thrillers, signs up at once. But when the twelve settle in, the projector shows an unfamiliar black-and-white film in which a man in a top hat and a smiling mask lays out knives and a chainsaw. Bored, Lily retreats to the back row, slips on her headphones and falls asleep.

She wakes to a metallic stench and police stringing yellow tape around eleven bodies. A theater employee insists no film played that night, and the manager says the projector has been broken for years and the masked man was a scrapped mascot from a decade-old horror event. Taken downtown, Lily faces Detective Miller, who reveals the victims died by a vintage fire axe, that an anesthetic was released through the vent, and that a micro-transmitter was found in her seat.

She has never seen the device before, yet it matches the receiver in the vent. What did she truly witness in the dark?