Saturday 7 October 2017

Immersive Screening Not So Original

Back in the late 80's a local cinema would screen midnight horror films and the staff would dress up in costume and in the scariest bits of films would jump out from behind pillars dressed as Jason from Halloween, appear suddenly with a torch in front of their masked face or throw cotton wool balls at you and generally try to give you the willies while the film was going on.
Seems our local cinema was ahead of it's time because now it's a thing and they call it 'immersive screenings'.
During some cinema screenings of the disappointingly poor remake of 'IT', a real-life Pennywise the Clown would creep around the auditorium during the film, jumping out at them and basically scaring the living daylights out of everyone there.
'There's huge growth in this area' says Simon Oakes, CEO of British horror brand Hammer, who went on to explain that the younger generation want to be involved in a story rather than told it and they have come up with something completely original.
I am guessing Mr Oakes wasn't in the Portsmouth ABC Cinema in 1987 during the Midnight showing of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 so he probably didn't hear me and my friends scream when Freddie Kruger leapt up from the seat directly in front and lunged as us with knife gloves clicking so i can guarantee that immersive screening works but as for being original, thirty years ago it was but we
just called it scaring the holy sh*t out of the audience.

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