In a publicity push that money simply cannot buy, several viewers of the cannibal-themed film Raw fainted during the screening at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Julia Ducournau’s movie is unlikely to release in India, since it features a vegetarian college student who develops a taste for human meat. Reaching for culinary terms in its review, the Variety trade magazine described Ducournau’s debut as “a deliciously fevered stew of nightmare fuel that hangs together with a breezily confident sense of superior craft”. Raw (its original title is Grave) made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2016, where it won the FIPRESCI Critic’s Prize.
Cannibalism is one of the most enduring taboos of human civilisation, and its depiction in the movies automatically leads to shock and disgust. Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), about a television crew that goes missing when trying to film a cannibalistic tribe in the Amazon jungle, caused a storm when it was released. Its director was accused of having killed people during the filming (a charge he denied) and briefly arrested in Italy. Cannibal Holocaust was banned in close to 50 countries for years – a fact that was tom-tommed on the DVD jacket cover.
Reports of viewers displaying a low threshold for horrific images have the power of five-star reviews. At least two people passed out when James Franco cut off his hand to free himself from being trapped between rocks in Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010). During a screening of Saw III (2006) in London, three viewers fainted. The hand-held camerawork in The Blair Witch Project (1999) led to several patrons throwing up. Ambulances reportedly stood by as viewers flooded cinemas to watch William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Audiences rewarded Friedkin’s vision by screaming, vomiting and fainting in theatres. Loss of consciousness has also been reported during screenings of Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002) and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009).
When audiences are not feeling the disgust, they can be induced to think they are. The barf bag has become the equivalent of the press release at several horror film showings. At festival screenings of Japanese enfant terrible Takashi Miike’s Ichi the Killer, which is a no-holds-barred sadomasochistic splatterfest, barf bags were handed out to audiences. Some of them dutifully used these receptacles.
One of the pioneers of movie promotion gimmicks was American filmmaker William Castle. For his first movie Macabre, which he financed by mortgaging his house, Castle gave every ticket buyer a life insurance policy. He also stationed nurses in theatre lobbies and parked hearses outside. The result: Macabre was a hit.