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We live in an evolving entertainment environment where many of our favorite movie theaters have been repurposed for other uses. Where I live, old cinemas are home to bingo halls and plumbing supply stores! Anderson’s Applewood 9 may have closed fifteen years ago, but its building has come back from the dead: today, it’s a haunted house!

The late 1970s and 80s brought enormous changes for cinema in Anderson. Flicks like It’s Alive and The Pink Panther Strikes Again played at Mounds Cinema in 1977, but Mounds Mall I & II showed Saturday Night Fever, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Wars! Soon, moviegoers started clamoring for bigger theaters with more auditoriums to see the newest blockbusters.

Downtown, the 868-seat Riviera Theater closed in 1978, and the palatial Paramount -a sight to behold if you’ve never been there- closed in 1984. The North and South Drive-Ins followed two years later, leaving the four-screen Mounds Cinema and the Mounds Mall I & II as Anderson’s premier movie houses. Sensing a market hungry for something new, Goodrich Quality Theaters entered the scene.

Goodrich was a minor player compared to United Artists, General Cinemas, Cinecom, and even Kerasotes, the companies that ran most of the theaters around Central Indiana in the 1980s. Goodrich’s story started fifty years earlier, when William Goodrich bought an old vaudeville theater in Grand Rapids. He renovated the hall to show movies, and it quickly became known for its inexpensive double features that only cost patrons fifteen cents to see.

Goodrich acquired another Grand Rapids theater, the Majestic, before passing control to his son, Bob. The company rapidly expanded under Bob Goodrich’s control and in 1988, Madison County’s Board of Zoning Appeals approved GQT’s plans to put a $2.5 million cinema on the south side of Anderson¹.

As planned, the theater featured seven screens with a total capacity of 1,800 patrons. It would stand just southwest of the brand-new Applewood Centre², which opened was anchored by a 70,000-square-foot Pay-Less Supermarket. Other early Applewood tenants included Bathtique Plus; Business Systems and Computers; Captain Cotton; Fashion Bug; Karma Records; Kids Mart; Party House; Peoples Drugs; Shoe Carnival; So Fro Fabrics; Sycamore; and Subway³. Just off I-69 at Anderson’s State Road 109 bypass, Applewood was the place to be!

Although plans and rumors predicted the new cinema would feature as many as seven⁴ or eight⁵ screens, the cavernous Applewood 9 opened on October 20, 1989. A full slate of movies were shown during its first weekend in business including Fat Man and Little Boy; Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; Batman; In Country; Phantom of the Mall; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; Millennium; Do The Right Thing; and Breaking In.

Early advertisements called out the theater’s wide screens, rocking chairs, computerized ticket booths, and full stereo sound in four of its auditoriums⁶. Those innovations proved that the Applewood 9 was at the forefront of Goodrich’s strategy to expand in Indiana, but there was more to come: in April, the company announced plans to build an eight-screen multiplex in Lafayette that later became the Eastside 10⁷. Both theaters featured angled lobbies that were uniquely identifiable.

Outside of Anderson and Lafayette, Goodrich considered building another eight-screen cineplex on Muncie’s northwest side in 1989. The company demurred after Carmike Cinemas opened their own seven-screen theater on West Bethel Drive later that year⁸, but Goodrich made a bigger splash by buying all of United Artists’ Indiana cinemas in 1990. The slate included multiplexes in Muncie, Kokomo, Logansport, and Lafayette⁹.

Goodrich entered Anderson at a time when the city’s theaters were centered around Mounds Mall. Both the Mounds Mall I & II and the Mounds Cinema -then known as the Showplace 4- closed in 2002, but GQT purchased the Showplace and continued to operate it until another massive shift rocked the city’s cinema landscape: the Mounds Mall 10 was built in 2004.

Mounds Mall had been acquired by Bayview Financial Corporation of Coral Gables, Florida, in 2003. A year after taking over ownership, the company built the Mounds Mall 10 on the site of a demolished JC Penney store. The new cinema featured modern auditoriums with stereo sound and stadium seating, and its amenities proved too much for Goodrich: the company closed the old Anderson 4 nearby, and converted the Applewood 9 into a discount theater to show films that already spent weeks in first-run venues like Mounds¹⁰.

Even though its discount tickets only cost $2.75, the Applewood 9 began to falter without new movies to show. In 2008, Goodrich announced plans to build a $19 million, 70,000-square-foot Hamilton 16 IMAX multiplex eighteen minutes from Applewood in Noblesville¹¹. That sealed the deal for the Applewood 9, which closed for good on October 27, 2008. “Our parking lot has usually been pretty empty,” remarked Kelly Owens, GQT’s marketing and creative director¹².

The abandoned Applewood 9 sat for several years before it was brought back from the dead as Stillwell Manor. With three different experiences within the cinema, the place was voted one of the Haunted Attraction Association’s Top Haunts from 2018 to 2023! In preparation for an off-season event, its eerie decorations were out in full force when I went to take pictures of the old Applewood 9.

Anderson is Indiana’s sixteenth-largest city according to recent census figures, but it’s a place without a movie theater. Despite its status as the next best thing, the Mounds Mall 10 was shuttered in 2019 after mall ownership changed hands once again. The new owner expressed interest in reopening the multiplex¹³, but it seems unlikely as the years continue to pass.

The Applewood 9 might not have the architectural appeal of the Riviera or the Paramount, but it’s worth remembering and investigating: by repurposing one of Anderson’s shuttered cinemas, Stillwell Manor accomplished something few others succeeded in, even if the old cinema’s new life came from beyond the grave.

Sources Cited
1 7-screen theater plan OK’d (1988, December 19). The Indianapolis News. p. 7.
2 (See footnote 1).
3 Make Applewood The Centre of Your Shopping Fun (1989, May 1). The Muncie Evening Press. p. 5.
4 Movie theater next for Applewood Centre (1988, November 23). The Indianapolis News. p. 7
5 Roysdon, K. (1989, April 13) There’s more news on theater scene. The Muncie Star. p. 19.
6 Applewood 9 (1989, October 20). Cinema Treasures. Web. Retrieved July 30, 2023.
7 McKinney, J. (1989, April 21). City to get new movie complex. The Lafayette Journal & Courier. p. 1.
8 Roysdon, K. (1989, July 20). Five new screens to open Friday. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 18.
9 Roysdon, K. (1990, August 30). At midnight, sale will be a done deal. The Muncie Evening Press. p. 2.
10 Newkirk, B. (2008, May 26). Theater closing. The Anderson Herald-Bulletin. Web. Retrieved July 29, 2023.
11 Reason, B. (2008, April 3). For IMAX, reception often larger than life. The Indianapolis Star. Pp. C1-C2.
12 (See footnote 10).
13 De la Batiste, K. (2019, October 11). Mounds Mall theater closed indefinitely as ownership changes hands. The Anderson Herald Bulletin. Web. Retrieved February 18, 2023.