More Exorcist movie malarkey

[FindingNamo]

The legend spins on and on and on like a loom. We all know that people died and ambulances were driven directly inside theaters showing The Exorcist back when it premiered, and even that one BWW poster who's relative saw a lady cannibalize a fellow moviegoer because it JUST FREAKED EVERYBODY OUT THAT MUCH.

In a Village Voice feature about Friedken's "Killer Joe," we have another writer making something up that will be passed on as gospel truth to people who REALLY NEED TO BELIEVE IT FREAKED EVERYBODY OUT THAT MUCH!!!

"I'll just tell you straight out, Killer Joe is the most disturbing film I've ever made," William Friedkin admits. This is really something, coming from a filmmaker who has spent much of an eclectic career testing audience limits. The Exorcist riled Catholics and had theaters stocking barf bags in 1973...

[ghostlight2]

Looms don't spin.

[FindingNamo]

Oh, okay. Um, what are those yarn wheely things called? It's about the yarn I'm aiming for.

[ghostlight2]

Spinning wheels.

[Jordan Catalano]

Seeing this tomorrow morning and I CAN NOT WAIT.

[Kad]

"...spins on and on like a spinning wheel" is just redundant.

[ghostlight2]

Well, true, but at least it makes sense.

[FindingNamo]

Is there a thing without a wheel where the wool twists into yarn? Maybe the spinning isn't as important as like a never-ending string of yarn that is bigger than the world's largest yarn ball and still growing, like BEYOND Guinness Book of World Records kind of thing. The point is like, people keep making up insanely exaggerated stories that make the Exorcist Movie Legend Yarn Ball frigging humongous. It also paints an early-mankind picture of the original audiences of The Exorcist as being not unlike those people who ran out of the theater when they saw the silent footage of a train headed toward the audience.

Would another layer of shellack work in a kind of decoupage metaphor, maybe?

[ghostlight2]

I think I'd start over if I were you.

[FindingNamo]

Hey you guys! This Village Voice writer says theaters passed out puke bags when The Exorcist was first released. Totally bogus. The writer may be thinking of the exploitation film, "Mark of the Devil."

It's like the legend of how terrifying The Exorcist was to the first audiences was like a snowball that somebody rolled down the longest hill anywhere in the universe and it kept picking up more snow and now 39 years later it is the biggest snowball in the history of snowballs and it's a snowball made of snow that is symbolic of the phony legends everybody wants to believe because they are invested in The Exorcist having been that scary to the Neanderthals who watched the movies on their cave walls.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Didn't they say this stuff about the 1931 Frankenstein? It always smelled off to me then, too.

[strummergirl]

re: Killer Joe, Been looking forward to this since film critic Friedkin champion Mark Kermode posted his immediate reaction to it. Warns about the chicken scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFg05yvTWq0

Sunshine Cinema is playing it and the 7:30 showing has Gina Gershon doing a Q&A afterwards with the audience. Seeing it tomorrow.

[FindingNamo]

Does anybody know if "Killer Joe" is Rated V for Violence?

[FindingNamo]

Pbyl, my grandfather saw Frankenstein in the movie theater as a young boy and said people had seizures and fits and they said one person died watching it two counties over. And that, in conclusion, is why Frankenstein has never worked on stage and will never work on stage ever!!

[themysteriousgrowl]

Looms? Spinning wheels?

The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back!

It's like you're unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting...

It's rated NC-17.

[Reginald Tresilian]

In 1927, Hamilton Deane arranged to have a uniformed nurse available at performances of "Dracula" on Broadway, ready to administer smelling salts should anyone faint.

[JoeKv99]

I think we were all a lot more delicate back then. The only movie-theater vomiting I ever witnessed was during "Making Love" right after Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean kissed.

[Roscoe]

William Castle used to arrange for nurses to attend certain of his horror films in case anyone fainted, and I remember reading that people were even paid to "faint".

Showmanship, man. Showmanship.

[ghostlight2]

The Tingler

[Reginald Tresilian]

ghostlight, do you promise that link won't take me to some online sex shoppe?