This seems as good a time as any to clarify what actually happened when the first King Kong movie was released. I’ve always heard stories that it was so terrifying that adults would faint in their seats or run screaming from the theater. True?
I’ve heard this, too. I think Goldner and Turner report it in their book The Making of King Kong, but I’ll have to check my copy at home. I’ve heard other reports that people laughed at it.
Certainly new effects affect people in odd ways. New York Times reporters were supposedly taken in by clips of the fiolm that Arthur Conan Doyle showed to them and sorta kinda tried to pass off as “real”. Today, they wouldn’t fool anyone – we’re too jaded. People were supposed to have thought the early interactive animated cartoon “Gertie the Dinosaur” was a giant mechanical contraption that Winsor McCay was interacting with – thwey’d never seen anything like it before.
When Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts (circa 1964) got to the skeleton-fighting scene, some audiences laughed. One writer suggested that it wasn’t that they were amused by the scene or the effects, but simply didn’t know how to react to something so far out of the ordinary.
The giant spiders supposed freaked out the audience. Here’s what a trivia item from the IMDB entry for the movie said:
Couldn’t have been too many. The movie made enough money that it saved RKO from bankruptcy.
I seem to remember reading that some of the reports of screaming viewers were generated by the flacks to build interest, but I’d need to find a cite.
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I’m going to send this thread screaming and running into Cafe Society.
Moved.
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