At a recent screening of The Walk at the New York Film Festival, multiple viewers vomited as a result of the film according to pop-culture journalist Mark Harris. Go figure: it features a 20 minute tightrope scene in 3D.
Reports of guys vomiting in the Alice Tully men’s rm post-The Walk: True. Witnessed it/came close. Bad visual trigger for vertigo sufferers.
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) September 27, 2015
The Walk tells the tale of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope artist who became famous for his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. Apparently the special effects team behind the movie recreated the 1350-foot high walk a little too well for some viewers, though that appears to have been the point. The film’s director Robert Zemeckis told the audience at a recent screening that the goal of the film was to induce vertigo.
“The thing I always wanted to do was present the walk itself, and of course that can’t be done in the documentary because there’s no video footage of the walk ever recorded …” said the director according to The Hollywood Reporter. “[The goal] was to evoke the feeling of vertigo. We worked really hard to put the audience up on those towers and on the wire.”
It sounds like he’s succeeded in his goal. While we can’t imagine that moviegoers planned on vomiting from watching the film, it’s become a challenge for some adventurous folk. After hearing that The Walk is inducing vertigo for some viewers, one moviegoer had just two words to say: “Challenge accepted.”
If you dare, you can catch The Walk when its released widely on October 9.
