Taran Egerton as Elton John in Rocketman
The three or four loud sneezes that erupted behind us during the 20 minutes of previews were a warning shot that all would not turn out alright for us during this screening of “Rocketman” in midtown Manhattan.
But the sneezing would not reoccur, in part because the offender would evidently fall asleep before the movie even began. Unfortunately sleeping would be the only thing this man did that would not be offensive to the rest of us in the movie theater, in ever escalating fashion.
The first thing to go wrong was the sound of an alarm that added itself to the sound mix early on in the movie, during the second song, a tender ballad no less. It was an odd old fashioned alarm sound, an electronic arpeggio that made me think of pagers or pioneering digital watches. Too modern though for the 1960/1970s era soundtrack we were trying to attend to on the screen. It took us half a minute or so to realize those repeated electronic arpeggios were not part of the movie. They must be someone’s odd ring tone, but no one was reaching into their pockets or purse to hastily silence the offending instrument.
The source of the sound was in the middle seat of the row directly behind me, yet separated by a horizontal aisle creating about 14 feet space between me and the big and tall, middle aged, thin haired white guy with his chin on his chest and his eyes closed.
I turned my head away from the screen I would have preferred to keep my rapt attention on, and searched for the source of the odd alarm. And saw that several heads of patrons in the rows raked up behind the horizontal aisle were looking about for the source of the irritant too. Once pinpointed, someone quietly whispered to the source to turn off the alarm but there was no response. I finally said, loud enough to be heard by those close enough to the droopy headed guy: “He’s asleep. Wake him.” I turned back to the screen, already perturbed by how much I had missed looking away and how much the alarm sound was messing with the movie. Behind me I heard someone determinedly waking up the keeper of the alarm. That eventually did the trick. It still took alarmingly long for consciousness and recognition and grumbling to segue into rustling in some bag or pocket to find and turn off the electronically arpeggioing device, but it finally was done.
Now we’d be OK, right? Far from it.
It is part of a longer section in the short story, where Poe allows the narrator to ruminate on terrors in the dark before describing the murder to come. The narration eerily extends that breathless moment before the protagonist 
Notes from a Composer 