On Monday, October 19, 2026, a surface parking lot will be turned into a temporary movie theater for a free drive-in screening. The lot opens at 6 p.m., the projector rolls at 7, and the feature is IT, the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's novel about a shape-shifting monster that stalks the children of a small Maine town. Admission is free. The event is billed as a Campus Activities Board (CAB) production, and the organizers have gone out of their way to say that a car is not required: lawn seating will be set aside for anyone who brings a chair and a blanket.
That last detail is what makes this screening more interesting than the average outdoor movie night. The drive-in format is built around the automobile, and the whole architecture of the thing -- the screen, the lot, the sound -- was designed for people sitting behind a windshield. Offering a patch of grass for pedestrians is a small but genuine break with the form, and it turns a parking lot into something closer to a neighborhood gathering.
The drive-in itself is an American invention with a surprisingly long history. The format consists of a large outdoor screen, a projection booth, a concession stand, and a big parking area where customers watch from the privacy of their cars. Early drive-ins piped sound through speakers mounted near the screen; later, individual speakers hung from car windows on a wire, which led to the recurring disaster of drivers forgetting the speaker was attached and pulling away, breaking the cable or yanking the whole pole out of the ground. Those were eventually replaced by broadcasting the soundtrack over a low-power radio frequency to car stereos, which had the twin advantages of stereo sound and no broken windows.
Drive-ins peaked in the middle of the twentieth century and then spent decades declining as multiplexes and home video took over. In 2020, with indoor theaters closed, the format came roaring back -- parking lots in front of diners, fairgrounds, and transit stations were pressed into service as socially distanced cinemas. That revival never fully receded. Pop-up screenings in borrowed lots have become a familiar part of the warm-weather calendar in Greater Boston, and a free one in a transit-adjacent parking lot is about as accessible as the format gets.
The film itself is a fitting choice for a parking lot in October. Andy Muschietti directed IT, working from a screenplay by Chase Palmer, Cary Joji Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman. It is the first of a two-part adaptation of King's 1986 novel, and the second adaptation overall, following the 1990 television miniseries. The cast includes Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, Finn Wolfhard, and Jeremy Ray Taylor, with Skarsgård's performance as the clown Pennywise becoming the film's most recognizable export. The picture runs 135 minutes, was made for a reported $35 to $40 million, and was distributed by Warner Bros. It opened in September 2017 and became a phenomenon, ultimately grossing roughly $719.8 million worldwide -- an extraordinary return for an R-rated horror film and one of the reasons horror has been treated as a bankable theatrical genre ever since.
A 135-minute runtime is worth noting if you are planning the evening. With the lot opening at 6 and the movie starting at 7, the credits will not roll until around 9:15, and the event listing gives the whole thing a window ending at 10 p.m. Bring layers; an October night in a parking lot gets cold once the sun is down, and sitting still in a lawn chair for two and a quarter hours is a different proposition from sitting in a heated car.
The setting has its own character. The station is the western terminus of the Green Line's D Branch, located in Newton's Auburndale village. It opened on July 4, 1959, and was rebuilt in 1995; it sits on the Highland branch and handles a substantial daily ridership, with a large surface lot of roughly 925 spaces. That lot is normally the place where commuters leave their cars before boarding a trolley into Boston. On this night it becomes the venue: rows of vehicles facing a screen, and, off to one side, a cluster of folding chairs and blankets for the people who walked, biked, or took the train.
There is something nicely circular about screening a movie about children banding together against a monster in a commuter parking lot at the end of a transit line. The drive-in was always a democratic form -- cheaper than a theater, forgiving of noise, tolerant of people who arrive late or leave early -- and the lawn seating pushes it a little further in that direction. No tickets, no reserved spots, no assigned seats. You show up, you find a place, and you watch.
For anyone in Newton or the surrounding suburbs looking for a Halloween-season outing that does not require a reservation or a ticket price, the practical details are simple. Monday, October 19, 2026. Parking Lot A. Lot opens at 6 p.m., film at 7 p.m., free admission, chairs and blankets welcome if you are coming without a car.