Perhaps you’ve heard them.

Chuckles, snorts, even outright guffaws emitted by your fellow moviegoers.

They ripple through the crowd when Nicole Kidman laps up milk from a saucer on her hands and knees in “Babygirl,” when Lily-Rose Depp contorts herself inhumanly in “Nosferatu,” when Mikey Madison is bound and gagged in “Anora,” when Daniel Craig is shooting heroin in “Queer” — maybe also when Adrien Brody does the same in “The Brutalist.”

Maybe it was you making those sounds.

“It was so self-serious, I could not handle it,” said Rob Truglia, a 34-year-old marketing consultant in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, of his experience watching “Queer.”

The friends who had accompanied him to the film, a historical drama directed by Luca Guadagnino, didn’t find it nearly so amusing, he said.

He had a similar reaction to “Nosferatu,” the hyper-stylized vampire movie from director Robert Eggers: “When Lily-Rose Depp’s character has the possessive episode, it was so over the top,” Truglia said. “It’s this beautiful woman foaming at the mouth and ripping off her clothes. The director must have been aware of the humor there.”

Not everyone is so sure. As some moviegoers yuck it up while watching this batch of critically acclaimed awards-season contenders, many of their seatmates are uneasy. Others are annoyed. Maybe even a bit judge-y.

That milk-lapping scene in “Babygirl,” some argue, is supposed to be erotic; “Nosferatu” is meant to be genuinely frightening; and while “Anora” may have elements of a rom-com, that fight sequence should be met with gravity.

In an essay for Angel Food magazine, Marla Cruz, a writer in Los Angeles, described her disgusted reaction to the audience’s behavior during the scene in “Anora” when a henchman discovers the female protagonist “bound and bent over.” “I cried quietly in the back row of the theater, nauseated by the audience’s laughter,” she wrote.

Some moviegoers are wondering if their seatmates have simply forgotten their manners. With the dominance of streaming, many viewers may be discovering anew what it’s like to watch films among strangers.

“A lot of people treat the movie theater like their living room,” said Alexandra Coburn, a film programmer in New York who had a job at an art house theater when cinemas began reopening during the pandemic. “As employees, we were often expected to respond to or regulate audience members’ complaints about each other — about people bringing in their own food, taking their shoes off, talking, laughing at inappropriate moments.”

Jon Dieringer, the founder of Screen Slate, had a slightly different view. “On the one hand,” he said, “you could say people have forgotten how to act at a movie theater. On the other hand, you could say people have forgotten how other people act at a movie theater.”

Social media, which allows scrollers to experience parts of a film as memes before they watch them unfold in a theater, may also prime people to find humor in scenes they wouldn’t have found funny otherwise, irritating some of the more serious film buffs in an audience.

The “laugh epidemic” — a term used by a movie theater spokesperson to describe the trend — going around in multiplexes and art houses may be more than a pesky annoyance. That audiences can be so divided on what scenes deserve a laugh seems in keeping with the widespread polarization of recent years. To some, that’s unsettling.

“There’s this desire to say we can all agree on something,” said Linda Ong, the co-founder and CEO of Cultique, a consulting firm that advises media, tech and entertainment companies. “We don’t want to be having disagreements on the things that are supposed to entertain us, like we do with politics.”

In other words, audience members yearn for the more communal days when they consumed the same mass media together and shared more or less the same interpretations of it, down to the laugh lines. That’s partly because our media landscape has become fragmented, Ong said, and the shows and films we watch tend to be highly specific to our tastes thanks to platforms like Netflix.

“I think what you’re also seeing is the result of cultural confusion about how to read things,” she continued, “and almost a fear of having the wrong reaction to something.”

Annoyed moviegoers may be making incorrect assumptions about why others in the theater are laughing.

Some audience members might be chuckling because something onscreen is funny ha-ha; others may be laughing out of discomfort, surprise, or recognition; still others might titter to convey that they understood an obscure reference. Or maybe laughter is just contagious.

“Sometimes I just hear someone else laugh and then it makes me think, maybe that was actually funny,” said Jordan Linekar, a manager for scripted and unscripted content at Paramount who sees movies in Los Angeles theaters about every other week. “Or sometimes people’s laughs are really unique, and I laugh at their laugh.”

In the book “The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience,” author Julian Hanich, a professor of film studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, defines 10 types of cinematic laughter. “In the darkness of the movie-theater one can hear aggressive, nervous, degrading, evaluating, embarrassed, shocked, disgusted, irritated, or contagious laughter,” Hanich writes.

Such are the side effects of being a voyeur among strangers.

Though it may be a human response to laugh — and to laugh for lots of reasons — some say that laughter can allow a viewer to avoid engaging with a film in a meaningful way when things onscreen get intense. Coburn said she noticed that audiences lately struggle to suppress snickers when films deploy melodrama, as in those directed by David Lynch or Douglas Sirk.

“People don’t know how to respond to that kind of mode anymore, because it’s so in your face and so saccharine,” she said. “I think you’re robbing yourself of a really important part of life if you can’t allow yourself to be truly overtaken by a movie without mediating it with laughter.”

At the same time, audience members who shoot the evil eye at people who do not share their own reactions may also be missing out on something, said Dieringer.

“Sometimes when movies try to make us feel a complicated range of emotions they’re susceptible to being misinterpreted,” he said. “But I think that’s part of the experience of seeing films in movie theaters, and feeling those emotions not just about the film but about the reactions of the people around you. I think that’s what makes film-going really exciting.”