The “most visceral audience reaction moment” James Cameron can remember
Before James Cameron released his sequel to Avatar towards the end of last year, one of the dominant subjects of online discourse was the absence of cultural significance attached to the project. Many film fans predicted that Avatar 2 would fail miserably, signalling the end of Cameron’s directorial trajectory after all these years. They should have known that it’s never wise to bet against Cameron, the man whose filmography is full of one blockbuster after another.
Avatar: The Way of Water ended up crossing the $2billion mark at the global box office, setting all kinds of records along the way. While Cameron has planned multiple sequels to expand the Avatar franchise, his body of work extends beyond the scope of this epic sci-fi film series. Including beloved classics like The Terminator movies and Titanic, Cameron has frequently experimented with the idea of the cinematic spectacle to create larger-than-life images.
The Canadian auteur also tried his hand at horror in 1986 when he decided to direct a sequel to Ridley Scott’s game-changing sci-fi horror masterpiece Alien. While the highly anticipated follow-up failed to live up to the standards of the original, Cameron retained his love for the genre that had influenced his love for cinema from an early age. In an article for Empire, he even wrote about the greatest audience reaction to a psychological thriller he had ever seen.
Cameron began: “The most visceral audience reaction moment I remember from my early film-going years is the jump-scare in Wait Until Dark. People can talk about Alien or Psycho or whatever all day long, but the scene that I vividly remember truly rocking the house was when Alan Arkin, the killer — presumed by the audience to be dead — leaps out of the dark and grabs poor blind Audrey Hepburn’s ankle. Of course, there’s a now-classic music sting — a single massive strum of piano strings that felt like an electric shock up the spine.”
He added: “The entire audience lost their shit — slammed back in their seats and SCREAMED like little girls — myself included. It was physical, involuntary, universal and perfectly synchronised. And the first time, I really understood the visceral power of cinema. It was at the Princess Theatre in Niagara Falls, Canada, in probably 1968 — the film was released in 1967, but Canada was always an afterthought. I was 14… Of course, when you see it now, it seems tame compared to all that’s been done in the half-century since, though still to be admired in the way the tension quietly winds tighter and tighter until the sting.”
Wait Until Dark is definitely an interesting selection from Audrey Hepburn’s incredible oeuvre, containing classics like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Directed by Terence Young, Hepburn received a nomination for ‘Best Actress’ at the Academy Awards for her performance as a blind woman opposite Alan Arkin’s terrifyingly psychotic villain.
Watch the scene below.
