Cinema | This looks like pea soup

No pleasant horror without a minimum of peace: “The Exorcist” (1973) Photo: Wikimedia Commons Cinema was always an expensive pleasure. As a teenager you had little money and there was a lot to choose from. Did you want to watch Jerry Lewis or Louis de Funès grimacing excessively or would you rather look at the stone face of Clint Eastwood? You had to think for a long time about which work of art (because these were films back then, unless Thomas Gottschalk and Mike Krüger starred in them) you wanted to spend your saved pocket money on.

In the past, not entirely unlike a library or a church, the cinema could be a place of devotion and quiet concentration. The older ones might remember. When you went to the cinema, you entered a parallel world in which you had to remain silent, at the latest at the moment when the lights gradually went out and the magnificent curtain opened.

There was an unspoken agreement between those in the cinema that as long as you were in that room you had to shut up and sit still. The only people who had the right to whisper, talk or scream were the characters on the screen.

Thomas Blum fundamentally disagrees with the prevailing so-called reality. He won't be able to change her for the time being, but he can reprimand her, admonish her or, if necessary, give her a beating. So that the bad retreats. We stand in solidarity with his fight against reality. Therefore, from now on, “The Good Column” will appear here on Mondays. Only the best quality for the best readers! The collected texts can be found at: dasnd.de/diegute

I must have been about 13 years old when I managed to persuade the elderly lady in the box office to let me see the afternoon showing of William Friedkin's horror film "The Exorcist." I must have begged the pitiful, perplexed woman so relentlessly and penetratingly for minutes until she eventually gave up, rolling her eyes, and handed me the ticket.

The small 1970s shoebox basement cinema in the basement, which had the very apt name "Studio Linse" and which at that time almost exclusively showed educational and colorful exploitation films or martial arts flicks from Hong Kong - "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS" (1975), "They Called Him Bone Crusher" (1978), "A Zombie hung on Glockenseil« (1980) – was almost empty that afternoon.

I remember that the film really traumatized me at the time: the wobbling and rumbling bed; the girl screaming in panic, her defenseless body being thrown back and forth on the bed; the crucifix, which, with its face contorted into a devilish grimace and performing masturbatory movements, it forcefully thrust into its bleeding abdomen, producing alarming smacking noises. “Your mother sucks cocks in hell!” An undoubtedly impressive sentence that I might not have said to the village priest or to my religion teacher at school back then.

While the film was playing, I couldn't avert my eyes, although from time to time I would sink deeply into the cinema seat in shock or, in panic, claw my fingers into the armrests of the cinema seats, which were covered in a purple, velvet-like fabric. In any case, the film contained just the right amount of blasphemy to gently prepare a teenager for adulthood.

The most important thing, however, was that there was calm among the seven or eight people in the cinema at the time. You didn't go to the cinema to chat undisturbed with your friends for two hours while constantly pushing popcorn into the feed hatch while some colorful images were being projected onto a screen somewhere up front.

“The Exorcist” is currently being shown again in a number of cinemas in major German cities in the so-called director’s cut version, which is why I thought to myself: Why not watch again on the big screen the film that 45 years ago caused me to sit on the bus home in the evening after going to the cinema, tormented by fear and with my face as white as milk and feeling like I was being pursued by invisible demons? Maybe the horror from back then will unexpectedly return?

But I vastly underestimated the fact that the unspoken rules about how one should behave in a cinema no longer apply today, in times of Tiktok, Instagram, ADHD and cultural regression. It has long been known that literary studies students no longer read (too strenuous, too long texts, too few images), and even film school students no longer want to be able to sit through an entire film until the end (too strenuous, takes too long, too slow editing), as I learned from a great essay by Rose Horowitch that appeared in the US magazine "The Atlantic" at the beginning of this year. Even a hyperkinetically edited barrage of images like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022) supposedly seems like a seven-hour Theo Angelopoulos film to today’s young people.

The large Berlin film theater where William Friedkin's 1973 classic was to be shown was almost sold out that evening, so I found myself wedged between two couples in their mid-twenties, making the evening at the cinema a complete torture. The gothic couple to my right limited themselves to smooching and occasionally whispering to each other to be patient ("I know, now they're just talking again, but just wait and see, it's about to escalate!").

But the young man on the left, who had been eating popcorn loudly for two full hours, couldn't sit still for three seconds: crossing his legs, putting his legs next to each other again, then one leg under his bottom, then the same sequence of movements in reverse, nervously tapping his feet on the floor, nervously tapping his fingers on his thighs, then cracking his phalanges, rubbing his upper body with his elbows and forearms, then groaning with his hand grab the back of your neck, first grab your nose with your left hand, then grab your nose with your right, then with both hands, then run your hands through your hair, grasp your constantly vibrating knees with your hands, bend forward, lean back again, slide back and forth noisily on the seat, then try out a lying position in the seat, then sit up again in the seat, then the same sequence of movements in reverse, bag of popcorn between your legs, bag of popcorn on the floor, Experimentally crumple up the popcorn bag and unfold it again.

So it went on and on. Every five minutes, he would comment loudly on the scene he was watching, turning to his friend sitting next to him: "Look at how she's floating!" - "That looks like pea soup!" - "Wow, he's got the broth on his face now!"

I'm not sure whether, in a better future, trained cinema employees shouldn't provide relief with gags and straitjackets if necessary. In any case, one thing is certain: the best horror film for the time being remains Michael Haneke's "The Seventh Continent" (1989).

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