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They Were Scared Of THAT? Supposed Reactions of Early Audiences

lopaka

lopaka

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The "Chanell 4's 100 Scariest Moments" thread left me thinking about something I've always been a little skeptical about. Whether the Lumiere Brother's train pulling into a station (there's a strikingly similar story about US cinema, except it's a cowboy with a six-shooter pointing it at the camera) ["people screamed, women fainted!"], Orson Welle's War of the Worlds broadcast ["millions of people freaked out! There was mayhem in the streets!"] or every last blessed time there's a solar eclipse ["in days past the simple natives were terrified that the sun would never come back'] we all sort of chuckle at how sophisticated we are now that we understand these things. There are undoubtedly other examples.

How many of these things have what one might call reasonable documentation attatched to them. I see the same stories repeated over and over, but precious little source material provided as a footnote. I mean, I'm not doubting that a few people (same with a bright meteor) called the cops when listening not-too-carefully to Welle's radio program, but these really strike me as being overblown to the degree, if any, they actually took place.

Anybody?
 
IIRC, Bob Rickard wrote an article in FT about the alleged/supposed panics after Wells' WOTW broadcast...
 
seems to me that the alleged ensuing furore was all part of mr. welles games.
 
Nice site says this about the Lumiere story that locates the event at a specific time and place:

On the 22nd of March 1895, they heal their first private screening; footage of a group of workers leaving their factory. On the 28th of December 1895, they held their first public screening of twelve short films at the Grand Café in Paris. It is an historic moment in the history of cinema, as it marked the first time that a film was screened to a paying public. The day is considered ‘birthday of world cinema’. The audience were stunned and gasped at the most insignificant of movements like the flutter of a leaf. The half hour show included a film of train pulling into a station. A number of audience members were scared out of their wits, as the train appeared to be coming straight at them. Another classic short was Watering the Gardener. It shows a gardener watering the bushes when a little boy creeps up behind him and steps on the hose, thus stopping the flow. When the puzzled gardener peers into the spout, the boy steps off and the gardener gets drenched. The clip is considered a forerunner to slapstick cinema.
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http://www.3to6.com/final_foreignfilm/foreign1_dir.asp?vid=2
 
lopaka said:
The "Chanell 4's 100 Scariest Moments" thread left me thinking about something I've always been a little skeptical about. Whether the Lumiere Brother's train pulling into a station (there's a strikingly similar story about US cinema, except it's a cowboy with a six-shooter pointing it at the camera) ["people screamed, women fainted!"], Orson Welle's War of the Worlds broadcast ["millions of people freaked out! There was mayhem in the streets!"] or every last blessed time there's a solar eclipse ["in days past the simple natives were terrified that the sun would never come back'] we all sort of chuckle at how sophisticated we are now that we understand these things. There are undoubtedly other examples.

How many of these things have what one might call reasonable documentation attatched to them. I see the same stories repeated over and over, but precious little source material provided as a footnote. I mean, I'm not doubting that a few people (same with a bright meteor) called the cops when listening not-too-carefully to Welle's radio program, but these really strike me as being overblown to the degree, if any, they actually took place.

Anybody?
Click to expand...

http://www.csicop.org/si/9811/martian.html

According to the above site, while quite a few people in the US experienced some level of excitement, there is little evidence that anyone actually grabbed their guns, packed the station wagon and headed for the hills.

Apparently, however, the same cannot be said about rebroadcasts in certain South American countries. Evidently there was rioting in the streets of Quito, Equador.

This leads me to question the impression we are given that in the past huge groups of people were cowed but such things as eclipses and comets.

We are given to believe that they thought that the moon was being eaten or the world was ending. Wasn't there anybody around who said, "Nah, I saw this a couple of years ago and nothing happened"?
 
Well, they might say "This happened a few years ago, we sacrificed a few goats and virgins, and the sun came back." They might still think the Gods have it in for them, and therefore get scared. I saw a woodcut as well, showing a massive meteor shower in Africa with pictures of all the natives running around in panic. Wether that was true I don´t know.
 
Well, people all over the world got pretty emotional about "The Passion", with some even confessing crimes or dying on the spot. An overblown reaction for a mediocre film if you ask me. But it comes to show the big impact that media can have on people all over the world, not just the 3rd world contries and such.

A good example is a video program from the BBC called, iirc, "Ghostwatch", suposed to be an investigation on a haunted house, and lots of people belived it was real. The list goes on, "Alternative 4", is another good example. And, how about those kids who go to New York for the first time and ask people where to find the Baxter Building? If stuff like this can happen in our media savvy times, what could you expect from a time when radio was a quasi magical thing? I have the original broadcast of WOW on a compact disc and it can be pretty convincing, specially for the time.

If the reactions were more proverbial than factual I don't know, but I am betting that a similar phenomena can be produced nowadays, perhaps on a bigger level than the "Blair Witch" movie did. In the end, media can be so powerful that it can, literally, brainwash people and prey on their fears, specially those related to the unknown.
 
The poor old Victorians, we treat them like such a bunch of idiots.
They might have ducked a bit, but it's highly unlikely that the Lumiere film brought panic, as it assumes that moving pictures were entirely new in 1895, when actually most people would already have been familiar with them in cruder forms, such as What-The-Butler-Saw machines, the Mutoscope and the Zoopraxiscope.
An account of the first Lumiere showing written by George Melies, who was actually there, makes no mention of any panic, and only six years later in 1901 British film-maker Robert Paul made a comedy film called The Countryman's First Sight of Animated Pictures, in which a rustic yokel flees in panic from footage of an approaching train.
The Victorian audience wanted thrills and excitement, and were far too sophisticated to react in such a daft way.
It must also be remembered that the Lumieres were keen self publicists.
Sorry folks.
;)
 
I think the evidence lies semi hidden in the fact 'big brother' 'changing kitchens' 'moving to france' 'cupboard make over' 'money for nothing' 'simon cowals search for the next marketable nubile' are all shows turning the viewers into bigger idiots than they were already.
I can certainly believe folks were freaked by War of the worlds but would also like some more concrete case historys
 
Merrick said:
Well, they might say "This happened a few years ago, we sacrificed a few goats and virgins, and the sun came back." They might still think the Gods have it in for them, and therefore get scared. I saw a woodcut as well, showing a massive meteor shower in Africa with pictures of all the natives running around in panic. Wether that was true I don´t know.
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Good point, I didn't look at it from that perspective. They could well have kept it up until someone said, "Hey, let's try with just goats this time, we're wastin' a lot of virgins here".
 
The list goes on, "Alternative 4", is another good example.
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Alternative 3 surely? Unless that's just what they want us to think :eek:
 
I went to one of the first 3d film shows wearing daft red and green cardboard specs. Many of the audience jumped, ducked and a few banged their neighbours' heads when something appeared to come straight out of the screen at us. Can't remember the film, I think it was a horror, something like 'the house of wax'. Don't think sophistication and common sense come into it until you've experienced the effect more than once.
 
Hardly running screaming from the theatre though, eh?
3D films are a bit of a dodgy comparison, after all, if you had never, ever seen one before then you would react accordingly. Basic moving images created by various means where a staple drawing room and sea-side entertainment before the Lumieres perfected their medium. And as I said, an account written by a member of that first audience makes no mention of the kind of panic often related as 'fact' in many otherwise credible histories of cinema.
 
I´ve been to the movies loads of times, and so far hasn´t run out screaming. But I once went to watch an omnimax movie, the kind where the screen is like half a ball around you. Now that made me actually sit and grab the seat, and want to duck when stuff came towards me or lean back when coming out over a cliff. I imagine it might be the same with the difference between small moving images and an actual Lumiere movie.
 
brian ellwood said:
I went to one of the first 3d film shows wearing daft red and green cardboard specs. Many of the audience jumped, ducked and a few banged their neighbours' heads when something appeared to come straight out of the screen at us. Can't remember the film, I think it was a horror, something like 'the house of wax'. Don't think sophistication and common sense come into it until you've experienced the effect more than once.
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My mum went to one of the early 3-D films where a plane flew out of the screen and the pilot threw a mouse into the audience. It certainly caused my mum to scream. (I don't imagine that the mouse was too happy either.)

It's always interesting playing "spot the 3-d movie" with old films. The gratuitous waving of objects at the camera is usually a giveaway. ;)
 
lopaka said:
The "Chanell 4's 100 Scariest Moments" thread left me thinking about something I've always been a little skeptical about. Whether the Lumiere Brother's train pulling into a station (there's a strikingly similar story about US cinema, except it's a cowboy with a six-shooter pointing it at the camera) ["people screamed, women fainted!"], Orson Welle's War of the Worlds broadcast ["millions of people freaked out! There was mayhem in the streets!"] or every last blessed time there's a solar eclipse ["in days past the simple natives were terrified that the sun would never come back'] we all sort of chuckle at how sophisticated we are now that we understand these things. There are undoubtedly other examples.

How many of these things have what one might call reasonable documentation attatched to them. I see the same stories repeated over and over, but precious little source material provided as a footnote. I mean, I'm not doubting that a few people (same with a bright meteor) called the cops when listening not-too-carefully to Welle's radio program, but these really strike me as being overblown to the degree, if any, they actually took place.

Anybody?
Click to expand...

This is of great interest--as close as we are likely to get to knowing what really happened when people were first confronted with 'moving pictures'--and there were a number of forerunners to the Lumiere Brothers and their oncoming train. With the Eidophusikon, magic lanterns and stage projections and the kinetoscope, the curve of familiarity was not so steep as we'd like to believe.

 
The Orson Welles War Of The Worlds story is blown out of proportion; if nothing else, barely anyone would have actually been listening to the show in the first place.

There was a survey of 5000 households the same night of the play, which found that fewer than 2% of respondents had been listening to the play, and many regional CBS affiliates just didn't broadcast it all. It received something like 2000 letters of complaint, which is actually quite low for a "controversial" broadcast of the time, and around a quarter of those referenced being afraid or panicked.

It seems like what actually happened is that there were a lot of calls asking if the broadcast was real, rather than assuming that it was, and the newspapers reported it as a mass panic - either because it made for a better story, or because it's not exactly uncommon for an older form of media to attack "new" media as irresponsible or morally bankrupt - the newspapers would have had a vested interest in presenting radio as unscrupulous and unreliable.
 
A bit closer to the present: did anyone here see The Exorcist when it came out? Were people really puking and shitting themselves in fright? Apart from that, did people really see it as that scary?
 
James_H said:
A bit closer to the present: did anyone here see The Exorcist when it came out? Were people really puking and shitting themselves in fright? Apart from that, did people really see it as that scary?
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A woman I worked with when I was a teenager told me about when she went to see it but with a crazy twist to most viewers experiences .. she told me that, yes, it was shocking and she left the cinema with her boyfriend to then also be confronted by the devastation caused by one of the Birmingham IRA bomb explosions, police, ambulances, everything horrible that comes with that .. that must have been a bit of a head f**k for her ..
 
James_H said:
A bit closer to the present: did anyone here see The Exorcist when it came out? Were people really puking and shitting themselves in fright? Apart from that, did people really see it as that scary?
Click to expand...

Last part first ... Yes - people at the time found the film particularly shocking, and it quickly obtained a word-of-mouth reputation that kept it active in conversations for a long time. This resulted in a sort of popular mania that probably couldn't be sustained today for the months and months it lasted in 1974.

Part of this was due to the special effects, which made The Exorcist a topic of technical / aesthetic discussion similar to what happened with 2001 a few years earlier and Star Wars a few years later.

Another part of it related to the progressive darkness of the times. By 1974 the upbeat / liberating Sixties mindset had been battered into post-Manson / post-Altamont dread, the economy was sliding into long-term malaise, and the Cold War was still hanging over everyone's heads.

IMHO the biggest part of it resulted from a well-made horror film with cutting edge FX surfacing in the mainstream movie venues rather than the B-movie circuit. In other words, mainstream moviegoers hadn't been widely exposed to the sort of explicit gore (etc.) that had become common in the B-movie horror genre.

How much of this was properly attributable to actual socio-cultural reaction versus Hollywood hype-mongering is anybody's guess. Whatever the cause, I can assure you it was a major pop culture phenomenon.

My close friends and I were more apprehensive about the hype than the allegedly shocking scenes per se, so we avoided the crowds at the movie theaters and simply didn't see it in original theater run. I went to see the film with a couple of friends at a drive-in the following summer, after much of the mania had died down. As it turned out, we laughed through most of it owing to the mismatch between the popular hype and the actual film.
 
James_H said:
A bit closer to the present: did anyone here see The Exorcist when it came out?
Click to expand...

I did! I was a regular cinema-goer at the time but very few films created the sort of buzz which had people queuing around the block to sit in a packed house. The Exorcist did; the only other one I recall was Monty Python & the Holy Grail. A few years earlier, Ken Russell's Devils had played to very sparse houses in Southport, despite similar controversy.

Suggestion was used to build up expectations of extreme reactions from some audience members. One common ruse was for cinemas to issue a press release that Saint John's Ambulance staff would be in attendance at showings of horror films. A few complimentary tickets would be sent to their HQ. I read somewhere that this was first used for Rosemary's Baby in 1967, where young women found the labour scenes traumatic. This seems a very late UK imitation of a similar business practice used in America for years.

As to people puking for The Exorcist. No one did in the crowded showing I attended and the only significant audience reaction I recall was a jump and subsequent laughter at that corniest moment when a loud telephone breaks a spell of hushed tension! :evillaugh:
 
Similar claims of people puking and crying etc were made for the Blair Witch Project. I think they were equally fictional...
 
I watched the Blair Witch Project and carried on watching to the end, hoping it would improve. It didn't.
I won't be watching it again.
 
Mythopoeika said:
I watched the Blair Witch Project and carried on watching to the end, hoping it would improve. It didn't.
I won't be watching it again.
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I actually really enjoyed it! But each to their own I guess.
 
One theory was, if you sat too close to the screen watching The Blair Witch Project, then you could experience motion-sickness as the camcorders swung wildly around the woods.
 
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