NEW YORK, NY.- At Heart of Gold, a cozy bar in Queens, a mad scientist recently brought to life a corpse that went on a blood-drenched rampage. But the people nursing their beers there didn’t call the authorities. They cheered.

That’s because the undead were marauding on a screen, set up at the front of the bar, that was illuminated by “Re-Animator,” Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror-science fiction splatterfest. The occasion was a Monday night gathering of the Astoria Horror Club, which meets regularly to watch scary movies over hot dogs, mulled wine and other anything-but-popcorn concessions.

Before the film, Tom Herrmann and Madeleine Koestner, the club’s co-founders, introduced “Re-Animator” with a trigger warning about a sexual assault scene and a reminder to generously tip the staff. About 35 people watched the movie seated, but others stood, complementing the onscreen mayhem with shrieking, gasping and, as a decapitated head got tossed around, an explosion of applause.

The Astoria Horror Club is just one of many film clubs that, while not new in concept, are quietly thriving in and around New York City. At many of these events, movies are shown not in traditional theaters but in bars, shops and other makeshift spaces, for small groups of people, many of whom arrive early for good seats and stay afterward to gush and vent.

The screenings are open to the public, but mostly it’s Gen Zers and millennials who are joining strangers to watch movies that, in many cases, are for niche tastes and were made before streaming was a thing.

These kinds of films are programmed regularly at the city’s revival houses, like Film Forum and Metrograph. But what these film clubs offer is ample space and time, where debate and friendships can blossom without leaving your seat. For cheap, too: At chain theaters, tickets can be more than $20 apiece, not including food and drinks. Many of these film clubs are free to attend, although patrons are asked to pony up for beer or bites.

As traditional movie theaters struggle to attain prepandemic numbers at the box office — North American ticket sales last year were around $9 billion, down from about $11 billion in tickets annually before the pandemic — it’s clear that these kinds of movie clubs won’t make a dent in Hollywood’s bottom line. But if there’s a lesson in being an antidote to the multiplex, it’s that moviegoing that’s bespoke and chummy feels a lot like home.

Catherine Prunella is an Astoria Horror Club regular, even though she doesn’t consider herself a horror fan.

“Making friends is hard to do in your 30s, but I’ve met people here, and now we hang out outside of horror club, which I think is the goal,” she said before the film started.

The club started in 2021 after Herrmann posted on an Astoria message board that he was “looking to watch weird movies with people,” as he put it. About 100 people responded. Each screening now attracts anywhere from 20 to 40 people, more in the summer when Heart of Gold opens its backyard.

Jason Zuckerman, a regular who has been there since the beginning, said the sense of community fostered at the first screening — the movie was “Scream” — has endured.

“You come in here, and you feel that energy of like, there’s a bunch of strangers, but I feel like I’m going to get to know them really well really quick,” they said.

In Hudson, New York, on a recent and rainy Friday night, some 35 people sat on a natty hodgepodge of couches and high-backed seats for the Queer Ass Film Club. Curated by Nathan Rapport and Jonathan Osofsky, the group meets every other Friday for screenings of LGBTQ films, both well-known and far out. The suggested donation is $10; candy and soda are a bargain at $2.

Rapport said he and Osofsky started the club last year as a way to offer queer programming in the Hudson Valley that “didn’t take place in a bar, that wasn’t DJ-related or drag-related.”

“We’re both edgy queers,” Rapport said. “We wanted something that was a little bit in your face.”

The club attracts a core group of about 10 to 15 locals, most of whom identify as queer. Films are shown on a projector mounted inside a large loft at Kasuri, a chic clothing boutique Osofsky opened in 2014 that sells Comme des Garçons and other avant-garde labels, and where Rapport runs a small queer bookstore and hosts exhibitions, life drawing classes and queer happenings.

This night’s film was “My Beautiful Laundrette,” Stephen Frears’ 1986 drama about the star-crossed romance between a Pakistani man (Gordon Warnecke) and a white punk (a baby-faced Daniel Day-Lewis) in South London, a movie Osofsky said he’d seen about 300 times. The crowd skewed Gen X, and was hushed throughout the film.

Cat Tyc was there with her friend, Andrea Kleine, in the front row. Tyc said she watches films at home a lot but makes a point to attend the club because it gives her a chance “to talk to people that you see around but have no other reason to talk to them.”

“There’s always an electric charge that’s not there when you’re sitting at home,” Kleine added.

Curiosity about the unknown is what drew people in on a recent Sunday evening to Fiction, a coffee house and jazz lounge in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for the Under-Scene Film Night. Ryland Swartz said he started the biweekly series in 2022 because “people want curation and direction and have someone say ‘you should look at this’ rather than look through 1,000 things on the internet.”

The movie was Richard Ayoade’s 2015 science-fiction dark comedy “The Double,” starring Jesse Eisenberg in dual roles of an office pushover and his conniving doppelgänger. Most people who showed up said they were unfamiliar with it.

But a film’s popularity matters not to Swartz, a filmmaker by day. The less popular the better, he said, to fit the club’s mission to show movies “that people have heard of but may not remember fondly, or movies that deserve a second look.”

Who would venture out on a cold night to take in an obscure screen adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novella that you can watch at home? About 20 people, a typical turnout, Swartz said. The room was quiet during the film; the only extra-cinematic sounds were light chatter and the bartender’s cocktail shaker.

A surprising number of people stood for the movie, which was projected onto a screen opposite the bar. Among them was Joseph Milholland, who traveled an hour on the subway from his home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He was a popular guy, having brought a giant plastic container of his mom’s home-baked cookies — chocolate chip and almond snowballs — that he shared with anyone who asked for one.

“I don’t watch as much film as I would like to,” he said. “This really helps me broaden my horizons.”

On Feb. 4, the Astoria Horror Club will present an afternoon horror brunch at Shillelagh Tavern in Queens, where the audience will choose the mini marathon of movies. (Pajamas are encouraged for maximum double- and maybe triple-feature comfort.) The Queer Ass Film Club will show the 1997 transgender coming-of-age drama “Ma Vie en Rose” (“My Life in Pink”) on Feb. 9. And on Feb. 11, Under-Scene Film Night will show the 2003 movie musical “Down With Love,” in time for Valentine’s Day.

No matter what film is being screened, these movie clubs tend to offer an atypical cinematic experience, where conversations are not only allowed, but exalted.

“You’re probably not going to go to a movie theater and talk to strangers for half an hour after a movie,” Swartz said. “That would happen here.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.