The Shining is one of the scariest films of all time Warner Bros/The Kobal Collection
DECEMBER 26th, 1973. All across the US, hordes of people brave the cold, dark winter to queue up outside movie theatres. Many wish they hadn’t.
“I’m not going back in there,” said one woman after leaving halfway through. “I just had to come out, I couldn’t take any more,” said another. Some people vomited, others fainted. Cinemas started stocking smelling salts and barf bags. “I’ve never seen anything like it in the 24 years I’ve been working in movie theatres,” said Robert Honahan, a senior theatre manager in Berkeley, California.
The cause of their distress was The Exorcist, a movie about a 12-year-old girl possessed by an evil spirit. You might think that the scare stories would have driven people away, but all they did was add fuel to the fire. The film was a sensation, raking in $66 million in its first year. Adjusted for inflation, it is one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
Anyone who has seen The Exorcist – or The Ring, or The Blair Witch Project, or A Nightmare on Elm Street, or any one of thousands of similar movies – can identify with the audiences of 1973. Torn between watching and not watching, we peer between our fingers, waiting for the next stomach-churning wave of fear, knowing it can only get worse. And when it’s all over, we breathe a sigh of relief, laugh, and wonder why we did it.
So why do we do it? To Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University in Denmark, the question is his…
