I was in the back of the theater for Carrie and the whole place levitated when Carrie’s hand comes out of the grave to grab Sue.
While I think it’s a good movie, and I have a pretty high tolerance for horror, I found that moment so stomach-churning (even though nothing explicit is shown) I’ve never re-watched the movie.
I was a kid when the original Planet of the Apes came out in 1968. I saw it as a first run movie in a large theater that was packed.
The end reveal, when the camera cut from Heston’s anguished face to the half-buried half wrecked Statue of Liberty rocked the whole room. It still wells up in my throat to think about it 50+ years later.
Watched South Park Bigger Longer Uncut on opening night in a crowded theater (it was the first and only time they checked IDs upon entry). The scene where the general shoots Bill Gates in the head got a huge round of laughter and applause, partly because it was in a town with a large number of IBM employees in attendance.
The line in Airplane! “give me Ham on five and hold the Mayo” got a huge groan out of the audience, mostly because it was in a theater two blocks from the Mayo Clinic and many in the audience were employees of Mayo.
Both were shocking in a comedic way, but even more so in an audience who took the references personally.
The shock from Silence of the Lambs for me was when:
Hannibal Lecter took off the “face” mask in the ambulance near the end
Similarly Steven Seagal’s death in Executive Decision
Deliverance when Burt Reynolds shot that guy with the arrow. The whole theater cheered. I’m not a violent person, but I joined in. If ever a guy needed killin’ it was that guy.
Good one. In the book the narrator is Bromden himself and the moment is less startling, but still powerful.
I genuinely think its hard to pull a shock like “Luke, I am your father” or “You blew it up ! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” nowadays.
Between the internet and trailers showing you every goddamned thing in the movie. I can’t think of anything remotely close to that in a recent movie.
Exorcist 3…you know the scene. I screamed in my head for a good 15 seconds after.
The moment in Halloween, when the supposedly dead Michael Myers suddenly sits up.
It seems predictable as hell now, the whole “the serial killer’s not really dead” bit. But it had never been done before, at least not that I’d ever seen. Take it from someone who saw it in the theater–everyone jumped!
Similar to these, I first saw “Risky Business” in a packed theater in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, where probably at least half of all college students attended the University of Illinois. And of course college kids were the movie’s target demographic.
So when Tom Cruise shouted, “Looks like University of Illinois!” it got a huge reaction.
A more obscure movie, “Meet Joe Black”, had one of the most surprising scenes when Brad Pitt got hit by a car. I’ve seen similar scenes since in “Final Destination” and other horror movies, but the CGI was done so well that I had to rewind the tape and slo-mo it several times to see how they pulled it off. It’s still pretty impressive today. Would post the clip but the video is blocked on my work computer.
I am a serious nerd when it comes to that movie. I have two different books on the making of it and have watched most of the documentaries.
When watching the rough cut of the film Spielberg felt as though he could get one more scream out of the audience. The underwater sequence was shot in the swimming pool owned by the film editor -a woman named Verna Fields.
When The Crying Game had been out for a few weeks, I told my mother that I’d heard it had a great surprise ending, and I didn’t want to know what it was before I went to see it. She replied “oh, you mean that the woman turns out to be a man?” I looked back at her and said “yeah, that was probably it.”
I didn’t see it in a theater, but there’s a moment in The Long Goodbye that comes out of nowhere and certainly surprised me. Elliot Gould plays a detective, and he’s being threatened in his apartment by a mobster who has some of his goons with him. On of the goons brings the mobster’s mistress in and gets her a drink from Gould’s fridge, a Coke in a glass bottle. The mobster starts telling her how much he loves her and how beautiful she is. Then he breaks the bottle and slashes her across the face with the jagged edge. he turns to Gould and says:
“Now, that’s someone I love! And you I don’t even like! You got an assignment, cheapie: find my money!”
I had a stunted childhood. I just happened to be looking away for a brief second in “Jaws” in the scuba scene AND in Star Wars when Han Solo came flying out of the sun at the end.
When I hear about a movie that seems interesting and has some apparent surprise, I try to avoid reading reviews and try to get to the theater the opening weekend so I can see it unspoiled. Not now, obviously, but pre-covid.
Wait Until Dark did essentially the same thing years earlier.
There are videos out there of the audience losing their freakin’ minds in Endgame when Captain America picks up Thor’s hammer.
Most of the posts here refer to shocking scenes of violence and blood and guts and gore.
Here was a low-key gasp moment I recall: The scene in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall where they are beginning to get it on in bed, but she just isn’t into it because Alvy wouldn’t let her smoke pot first to get in the mood.
See what happens in this scene starting at 1:40
I recall, when I saw this movie, the whole audience gave a quiet, but audible gasp.