Film Festivals breed publicity stunts, although I can assure you that the majority of them are quite real. All of the fainting and walk-outs, they happened, and they weren’t some local actor hired to make a scene. But how about when people walk out of a movie? This is straight-up normal, especially at a festival that acts more like a market for distributors. What this means is that studios and independent companies go to the film festivals to find movies to release under their banner/label. Filmmakers don’t want their films shown on a small computer screen (rightfully so), but instead in a theater with hundreds of people. This forces these buyers to see the films on their list in a theater, at the festival. They aren’t there as fans or film buffs, but doing a job, which means they all sit on their cell phones and annoy everyone around them will walk out of a movie the second they know it’s not for them. Walk-outs? It’s on the reg.

With that said, sometimes there’s a movie that not only turns off buyers, but also the audience. Kuso is allegedly so gross and disgusting that there was a huge walkout — making this my most anticipated genre film of the year. In fact, our very own Ben Larned called it “the quintessential gross-out midnight movie.“

Steven Ellison, better known to the public as the incredible musician Flying Lotus, is behind Kuso, which is getting all sorts of press for the walk-outs.

Chris Plante, a reporter for The Verge, chronicled the exodus (via Variety), while also calling Kuso “the grossest movie ever made.” 

“A large chunk of the audience left my screening early, when a boil-covered woman choked a man with a strap until he covered half her face with semen that looked like a muted version of Nickelodeon slime. But the walk-outs continued in a consistent stream up to the final scene. Some gross-out films are one-note, but ‘Kuso’ finds new ways to test viewers’ fortitude. Some folks stuck around after a woman chewed on concrete until her teeth disintegrated, but still peaced out when an alien creature force-yanked a fetus from another woman’s womb (accompanied by a ‘Mortal Kombat’ sound clip: ‘Get over here!’), then smoked the tiny corpse.”

Flying Lotus did downplay reports of mass departures, tweeting: “It was only like 20 people out of like 400 who walked out. Wasn’t as dramatic as they make it out to be. I tried to warn folks.”