The Empathy Machine
I had to take the poster down in the end.
I was eleven in the summer of ‘93, and it was all anyone had been talking about for months. I was the perfect age for it - obsessed with dinosaurs since a trip to the Natural History Museum aged eight, then a now-obscure cartoon called DinoRiders and accompanying action figures sealed the deal. And now here was a movie where they looked real.
As it turned out, too real.
Jurassic Park was a phenomenon. A genuine blockbuster in the true sense of the word - lines literally round the block of people ravenous to check it out, to be part of the cultural conversation.
It’s 30 years old this summer, and it still holds up. It’s incredible how layered it is - a meta commentary on capitalism and spectacle, a meditation on hubris and control, an emotional journey of a closed off man learning what it really means to be a father. But for me, aged eleven, it was a terrifying exercise in horror.
Seriously, it’s a horror movie - designed to be as scary as possible. Those monsters are relentless. They’re power and rage and unpredictability. And they’re our fault.
It was pretty rare at that time to see young kids in genuine danger, and Lex and Timmy in Jurassic Park are in major peril at every single stage, and I was with them every step of the way.
Cinema is called the empathy machine - that huge screen filling your entire field of vision, the epic sound system drowning out any sense of the outside world. You truly lose yourself in cinema in ways that you can’t with a book, or music, or any other form of art, where you’re always aware that you’re reading or listening or looking. And when you lose yourself, you feel what the characters feel. So if they’re scared for their lives for the better part of two hours, so are you.
I don’t think I’d ever felt that emotion in a movie before. Home Alone was funny, not scary. Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, BMX Bandits - adventure, thrills, humour, not fear.
I couldn’t get it out of my head. I couldn’t sleep. I could picture the Velociraptor peeking out from behind my curtains, grinning at me and scratching at the door, itching for its next kill.
So I had to take the poster down, get it out of there.
And I had to see it again.
