I was a little too young to catch it in the movie theater, and as I was watching it again the other night, I was wondering what that may have been like. What was the audience’s reaction when the big reveal happens where Lecter sits up in the ambulance and removes the mask he fashioned from the guard’s face? Or what was that reveal like on your first viewing - when you didn’t know about the body switch? How about when Buffalo Bill dons his night vision goggles and reaches his hand out to *almost *touch Agent Starling in the dark?
A full theater screening seems like such a special environment to me (barring jerks). I was lucky enough to see The Godfather for my first time in a packed theater that was rerunning it. The place was packed full of middle-aged men who were giddy as hell to be seeing it on the big screen again. I was in high school at the time, and before the lights went down I told a couple of the people around me that I’d never seen the film before. They freaked out (in a good way). They were indescribably happy for me and the experience I was about to have.
I saw Fatal Attraction in theatre, with my mom a few seats away. At the bathtub moment, I immediately predicted what was going to happen and rolled my eyes a bit as the crowd around me freaked.
The pitch black moments on Silence of the Lambs were the most creepy.
Other moments that made me glad to see it in the theater:
Seeing Laurence of Arabia in a 70mm print on a big screen. As he rode in from the desert, a tiny speck getting bigger. I can’t imagine seeing that on a TV first.
Alien - I saw this at the Midland Theater in Kansas City. A huge theater, and the scene where they are in the alien ship finding the eggs. Man, the combination of the film and the location was something.
Raiders of the Lost Ark - I saw this in a terrible, cracker-box theater (the unlamented Seville Square) but it was still magical. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, but the theater was full and the girl sitting next to me grabbed my arm in fright at the spiders.
It was pretty amazing, for me. I saw it with my then-husband, and when we got home, made him go inside the house and open all the doors to all the closets and cupboards to make sure nobody was hiding in them. Seriously.
It wasn’t those scenes per se, just the overwhelming dread of the movie that got to me.
I was glad to have seen Silence in the theater, before I knew much about it. But I’m even gladder to have seen The Sixth Sense in a theater the opening weekend. No matter how many people tell you they saw the end coming, nobody in my theater did. The biggest scream? When the kid goes to pee in the middle of the night and the woman/ghost walks by the door. YOWP! But the biggest surprise was reading the end credits and finding out the psycho guy at the beginning was Donnie Wahlberg! Whoa!
I was probably more tense during that movie than any other I had experienced. My girlfriend had her eyes closed and her face pressed up against my arm for most of the movie. Oddly enough, after the movie was over she smiled and commented what a great movie it was. Personally, I questioned myself why I would put myself through so much stress for entertainment’s sake.
My girlfriend at the time didn’t have a very good time, because she began to feel very sick midway through the movie, and had to leave the theater.
That compelled me to follow her to make sure she was OK.
Unfortunately, we left just as Hannibal was in the process of drawing out of Clarice the explanation of what made those lambs cry. As we were leaving the theater, I could hear the dialogue: “The lambs were–” and then the door shut. Even though my girlfriend made a quick recovery and we re-entered the theater after just a few minutes, I never got to see/hear the rest of the scene.
I don’t remember it as being special compared to any other suspense thriller. The first Michael Keaton Batman movie however was quite the experience. Theater jampacked, with loud cheering or laughing at the appropriate moments.
I was married then (speaking of terror). When we saw thriller, my wife used to grip my hand really hard and kind of twist it. At Silence of the Lambs, she dislocated my little finger.
In 1960, I was seven years old. My mom had some evening plans and told my older sister (who was fifteen) to take me to the movies. We walked to our neighborhood theater and saw Psycho. I remember that walk home in the dark, and how scared we were.
Yeah, everyone knows all of the twists in Psycho now, and it is pretty tame compared to the more recent slasher movies, but the memory of seeing Psycho in a big theater and walking home after wards remains undimmed after almost fifty years.
I didn’t get to see Silence of the Lambs in the theater. I wish I had because it really blew me away in the ambulance scene and when “Jack Gordon” answers the door.
But what I DID get to see in the theater on it’s first release was Star Wars. And it was before the real phenomenon began to happen. So I had no idea what was coming. I was 7 and I saw it in a vast theater with a huge, wrap-around screen and an impressive sound system. I remember the way the audience jumped at the opening music and the “Ooooo…” that they made as the opening shot drew out.
My father saw Frankenstein (1931) when it was first out. He was 12. He liked it so much he sat through it twice. When he came out of the theatre, it was . . . DARK. He ran like stink all the way home. He remembered that for the rest of his life.
When I saw Silence of the Lambs in the theater and they first mentioned the name Hannibal Lector, I went Yesssssss! There had been no hint in the advertising thayt he would be in the film, and I hadn’t seen any trailers mentioning him.
A few years earlier I’d been surprised to stumbled across the Michael Mann film Manhunter on cable, and it blew me away. I was hooked by the film in seconds. And the best part of the film was the psycho Hannibal Lecktor (that’ds how they spelled his name in that one). The way he could manipulate people from inside his sterile, antiseptic cage (it was all flawless white) was nothing short of wonderful. He was easily the most interesting character in the movie, even more so that William Peterson’s FBI agent Will Graham (who was also pretty damned good). Lecktor was played by frequent bad gut actor Brian Cox, who did a superb job. He had very6 little screen time, though.
It was immediately apparent to me that Silence was a sort-of sequel by a different girector (Jonathan Demme) with a different actor (Anthony Hopkins) with different isual style (instead of an airy sterile cell high up in a building, Lector is in a gritty, stone-walled basement cell), but the same writer was behind both, and this time they gave Lector more room. I wasn’t disappointed.
I didn’t experience any collective audience gasps at the moments the OP suggests. It was pretty clear to me that Lector had escaped long before the police realized it, so I wasn’t as surprised by the “reveal” in the ambulance.
I also felt that subsequwent films were an effort to milk the franchise. They seemed to be working too hard at it, and too unlikely. The movie Red Dragon featured some fine actors, and sewed up some loose ends left unanswered in Manhunter, but Manhunter was by far a bettter film, IMHO.
The first adult movie (not *that *kind of adult, you perves)that I saw in the theater was The Poseidon Adventure. I was only six at the time and I was absolutely transfixed. I’ll never forget the scene where the huge wave is crashing toward the ship and Leslie Nielsen says “OH MY GOD”, the two groovy chicks in their 1970’s party gowns climbing up the christmas tree, Shelly Winters swimming through the passageway, Gene Hackman’s doomed priest’s monologue. Oh and the scene where they find the burned dude in the engine room - that was a little traumatic but man, did I love that movie.
I also saw Silence of the Lambs when it was first run and as much as I like the movie, I don’t recall it making that much of an impact on me or the audience. The movie that elicited a much more dramatic response was, believe it or not, The Ring. The collective gasp the audience let out when they do the quick jump shot to the girl in the closet was nothing compared to the screams when Samara comes out of the tv set. I’ve been watching horror movies my whole life and I’ll tell ya, I did not sleep a wink that night.
I have to admit, when Pepper Mill and i finally got around to seeing this film, after all the hype, this scene had us laughing hysterically. No joke, and no implied put-down of anybody. It simply didn’t work for us at all.
I’ve grown up watching people popping out of TV sets or into them in countless TV shows and movies. Possibly the scene conjured up those previous cases , which were almost invariably played for laughs (an exception being the cheapo SF film The Time Travelers). We also couldn’t help thinkingf “what if they’d been watching a miniature TV?” or “So how did she get those people riding in the car?”
It was just freakin’ awesome. Not just because we saw it in the theater, but because we knew almost nothing about it. Why is it called Silence of the Lambs, and furthermore, if it is, why are there moths on everyone’s mouth in the posters? I think we knew it was a thriller about a serial killer. But that’s it.
It probably helped that I was 17, and a friend and I went to the theater on a double date. Perfect milieu for scary stuff.
Also, I remember the very plain opening credits coming up, and being struck by the simplicity, thinking, “This must be something different.” And boy was it! We were totally drawn in, and that scene in the basement with the night vision goggles had my skin crawling.
As for other films, I went to see The Crying Game right when it came out - it might even have been an early release. A friend invited me “to go see this movie about the IRA.” That’s all we knew going in. At the critical moment, I’d definitely say penis ensued in the theater!
I was a grown up lady when I saw it with my sister, also a grown up lady.
Despite being grown up ladies, we giggled from the point where I loudly exclaimed “Oh, my God! He’s making a skin outfit!” till, you know, pretty much right now.
I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. I had already seen it before, but this was special – 70mm print, 12-track stereo Surround Sound on a great system, the works. It was amazing. You could hear Indy’s whip swish around you. It was also fun that the movie was preceded by an audience sing-along of old standards.
I had that experience in Rocky. Many of us in the audience were on our feet cheering during the climactic fight.