Episode 003- Religious (and Sacrilegious) Experiences

Sharing the movie experience with a theater full of people can be exhilarating or frightening—sometimes both.  You put yourself in the hands of the filmmaker to take that ride, not knowing where or how it’s going to end. 

In rare cases a movie can provide an audience with an ecstatic, transcendent experience, almost religious in its power that leaves you walking on air afterward and running back to grasp that experience again. Sometimes the audience isn’t ready for that story or style and the shared experience with the audience is much darker and marked with disapproval…and sometimes outright hatred.  It’s as if the film has committed sacrilege against your expectations for it. When that happens in a horror film is it the fault of the film or filmmaker, or the audience not prepared for the “horrible-beautiful” imagery and storytelling that challenges the comfort zone? In this episode we discuss religious and sacrilegious experiences in movie theaters, and the unwritten pacts that audiences make with filmmakers, and how the shared experience in a theater affects your own experience of the film. iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-003-religious-sacrilegious/id1090978706?i=1000365887194&mt=2