In a long ago thread I mentioned going to see Star Wars with my grandmother, who was then about 79. She had taught biology on both the high school and college levels before becoming a stay at home bag lady and she had a take on the movie that’s stayed with me ever since (even though I didn’t really understand it when I was 11).
I can remember the theater where I saw most films I’ve seen. Star Wars (years before all that “A New Hope” jazz) opened at the wonderful Glenwood Theater in Kansas City. It was built for Cinerama, and had a deeply concave screen, combined with a deeply convex seating arrangement with a center aisle. The end result was that you could sit in the front row but also be a good distance from the screen, and on the aisle. It kicked ASS! (Chicago’s tragically gone McClurg Court had the same layout.)
Imagine sitting in the seat I described as the ship passes pretty much overhead. Oh, and the sound system at the Glenwood defined the state of the art at the time, with JBL A2 bass horns.
That is going to be my new philosophy of life.
I think it’s meant to be more shocking plot twist than terrifying. It’s weird; I can completely see how someone would find this movie hokey and yet after all the scary stuff I watch and have been watching since I was very young, this one really did me in.
Ring hijack concluded.
It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but at that point don’t the protagonists think they’ve gotten rid of Samara by helping her? So the horrifying bit isn’t that helping her somehow made her more powerful, its that it won’t stop her from crawling out of TV sets and eating people, and they’re still screwed.
As others have noted, it’s not that it makes her so much worse, it’s that the “traditional remedy” that seems so common in ghost stories (find and bury the remains, uncover the truth about her death, etc) just doesn’t work…it’s like shooting a werewolf with silver bullets and finding out that this particular werewolf isn’t harmed by silver; it’s not that the werewolf grows bigger fangs or anything, it’s that the thing that you thought for sure would stop it doesn’t work.
Yeah, but the way the kid reacts in horror (“You weren’t suppsed to help her!!”) makes it sound as if they’ve done something horrible, and made the situation worse, rather than , essentially, having done nothing to cange the situation.
Godzilla marches down the Tokyop street, taking random swipes out of buildings.
Soldier fires shoulder-mounted missile at Godzilla. It hits him in the chest. Godzilla doesn’t even notice.
Soldier’s officer smacks soldier on the back of his helmet. He speaks (although his words don’t match his lip movement) “Idiot! You weren’t supposed to HELP him!”
Doesn’t compute.
SotL was a good movie, completely ruined by Anthony Hopkins’ clownish, over-the-top ham acting. It’s a shame, he was so good when he was younger, but in his later years he seems to have lost all the restraint and levels that had made him so compelling.
So for me, seeing it in the theatre was a massive disappointment, with me constantly asking, “Was Brian Cox unavailable?”
My earliest memory of a crowded movie theatre spontaneously reacting in unison? In “Airplane!”, when we hear a DJ say "This is WZAZ in Chicago, where disco lives forever… " and then the plane crashes the antennae, the whole theatre broke out in cheers and applause. I was nine, and had no real opinions about disco, but cheered along with everyone else in an Orwellian moment of group-think.
thwartme
I’ll third the experience of seeing the Sixth Sense on opening weekend.
No one, and I mean no one, in our crowd seemed to expect that Bruce Willis was dead. I will never forget the moment the whole crowd realized it.
Waves of astonishment went over us as everyone looked around and said, “He’s been dead…THE WHOLE TIME!!!”
We freaked out and it was wonderful!
[thread hijack]
I saw A Few Good Men while in basic training - in the middle of a field surrounded by other new recruits, all of us covered in cam paint and dressed in combats, with our rifles at our sides.
Our course officer had dragged out a TV and a VCR so we could watch it using a generator.
Everything was fine until “You can’t handle the truth!” and the genny ran out of gas.
It was a LOOOOOONG ten minutes to get it re-filled.
[/end hijack]
Seriously? I realized this about fifteen minutes into the film. The rest of the movie was just kind of tiresome. This is not a film that works once you get the “big reveal”; in retrospect, it’s a really weak story, although not nearly as stupid as Signs.
Stranger
Hope this isn’t too off topic, but the greatest movie experience for me (and I saw Star Wars opening weekend too!! But I was 7, and YES I was blown away) has to be the evening I saw South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut.
I was a big South Park fan but hadn’t been to the US in a while and didn’t get a lot of the hype, I was surprised there was even a movie. I had only been back a few days and my brother-in-law took me to see it. It was opening night, and it just knocked my socks off. The music! the unbridled profanity! The music!
Perhaps the greatest moment was the fake starts Cartman does of “Kyle’s Mom’s a Bitch”- when Cartman fakes giving up, the audience let out a huge collective “AWWWW!!!” And then when he rudely busts in and bursts into glorious full throated song, replete with an international children’s chorus a la “It’s a Small World”, well, the entire house just lost it. People were literally pounding the seats in front of them with closed fists. I never wanted it to end.
I think he reacts in horror because he can’t believe that his parents didn’t see what he did: that the girl is a Force of Evil, not a spirit looking for closure.
And Sampiro, that was awesome! 
Did you have any idea that there was any kind of twist at all?
Silence of the Lambs was the last movie I saw where the audience was allowed to smoke in the theater.
Fearless Prognosticator here said to my g/f: “Too bad this was released in February, else it might win some Oscars.” Her response: “Movies like this are never nominated anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
0 for 2, baby!
I had that happen during Halloween. Good times. 
Don’t know what you meant by “real phenomenon”, but the opening day of Star Wars was covered in the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Just FYI.
The two best audience reaction movies that I can remember are both Quentin Tarantino films:
At the end of Pulp Fiction, the audience started applauding. I saw it on opening night, so it wasn’t a roomful of QT fanboys or anything, just people who saw a great movie, realized that they just saw a great movie, and felt like showing their appreciation for the film. Don’t think I’ve ever seen that before or since.
Except once.
I saw Grindhouse on opening night, midnight showing. The audience was full of QT fans, they knew what to expect, and they were thrilled when they got it. The air was just crackling with energy and at the end of Death Proof, everybody stood up and cheered.
I remember going to see The Last Temptation of Christ and Torch Song Trilogy in the same month in 1988 at an art house theater and both were picketed.
Temptation (which could never have afforded to buy the kind of publicity its controversy provided) had more due to the blasphemous allegations and because the literature that “Interfaith League Against Blasphemy” and other groups had distributed made it sound far racier and far more interesting than it was; it was a mediocre screenplay, painful miscasting (Dafoe and Keitel especially) and at times unintentionally funny, but it didn’t have the super graphic sex scenes or polygamous marriage (Jesus, Mary, and Martha) that the descriptions from people who’d never actually seen it claimed. The picketers were mostly from local churches (Catholic and Baptist) and were well behaved, and a policeman was there to make sure it didn’t get aggravated. I don’t know if they stood outside the whole time but they were still there when we exited, handing out literature to whoever would take it (mine was a badly printed flier on church services and telling me God forgave me for watching the film).
The picketers at Torch Song were far fewer and just kind of phoning it in- signs with the Leviticus verses and “there’s hope for homosexuals”, though they were more sneering and a bit younger than the others.
Both movies were mobbed, which hardly ever happens at that theater.
Which hardly compares with the publicity it was receiving a few weeks later. And for the next 30 years.