The original audience reaction to ‘The Exorcist’ was off the charts

nypost.com:

“The Exorcist Legacy: 50 Years of Fear” (Citadel), it could have called for its own exorcism. The same kind of crazed scenes were happening nationwide at almost two dozen theaters where thousands would turn out for the premiere of what was being billed as one of the most frightening horror movies ever made — and accurately so.As Segaloff puts it, when the film opened, “the bedlam began.”At the Savoy Theater in Boston, “People were running up the aisles and into the lobby, some of them making it out to the street before vomiting, while others did it en route.”“I couldn’t imagine people being affected like that.

I just stood around and watched the crowd; that was a movie in itself,” Tom Kauycheck, the manager of the theater chain, told Segaloff. “Ticket-holders waiting in line for the next performance would see the distressed faces of those leaving and pump themselves into a frenzy even before the lights went down.”One critic, Stuart Byron, wrote in his review that “the film had made him sick.” Screenwriter and novelist William Peter Blatty recalled attending the first public press preview in Manhattan, and later claimed to be “the only person who knows why people got sick.”He watched as a young woman came up the aisle, and passed by him, saying, “Jesus, Jeeeesus.”Blatty noted the point at which she fled the theater, and when “everybody got ill… It’s when they’re giving Regan the arteriogram and the needle goes in the neck and the blood comes out.