Did the first movie audiences really run from a train on the screen?

Almost certainly not. The famous story says that when the Lumière brothers first showed their 50-second film of a steam train pulling into the station at La Ciotat, people screamed and ran to the back of the room. But historian Martin Loiperdinger points out that no report from the time mentions any panic, even though a stampede in the crowded screening rooms of the era would likely have caused injuries and made the local papers.

Some viewers really were startled. In 1896 the Russian writer Maxim Gorky described a train on the screen that speeds right at you. Historian Stephen Bottomore collected many firsthand accounts like his, of spectators being startled or frightened, but found no confirmed case of anyone believing the train was real. Film historian Tom Gunning compares the thrill to a roller coaster: it looks dangerous, and you know perfectly well you are safe.

So where did the legend come from? As early as 1901, filmmakers were making comedies about a naive country visitor who flees in terror from a train on the screen, and Loiperdinger suggests that this joke about country rubes may be the origin of the belief. Showmen helped too: after two women reportedly fainted at a rival train film, a theatre parked an ambulance at its door for every later showing, a story Bottomore suspects was a publicity stunt.

Even the film's legendary premiere is a myth. It was not on the programme of the Lumières' first public screening in Paris on 28 December 1895; it was first shown publicly in Lyon in January 1896.