Then cache the “I've‐neverstood‐in‐line‐before” people. “I tell you, I have never stood in line for any movie or any restaurant before in my life!” said a 68‐year‐old woman from Peter Cooper Village, who refused to give her name.

“I haven't stood in line since the time I saw Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theater,” said Mrs. Lee Piccillo, a 46‐year‐old blonde in a leopard skin coat, who was with six people from Port Reading, N.J., including her husband, John, a truant officer. “I was just a girl then,” she added, dreamily, “and Frankie was... wonderful!”

Many people were coming back to see the movie for a second time, or a third, or a fourth, or a fifth. Jack Fletcher, a 19‐year‐old drama student at the Juilliard School, said he had seen the film while home for Christmas in San Francisco, and was back to see it again because it was “so terrifying.”

“I like horror movies very much,” he said, “and this movie is definitely the best one to come out since the 1930's or 1940's. It's much better than ‘Psycho.’ You feel contaminated when you leave the theater. There's something that is impossible to erase. I've had nightmares ever since I've seen it.”

Bruce Galashaw 24 of Queens, who recently graduated from Bernard Baruch College, returned to the theater to see “The Exorcist” after having walked out on it (“I got sick”) the previous day. This time he brought his girl friend, Barbara Simpson, for moral support.

“I had just gotten through eating yesterday,” he explained, sheepishly. “Then got into the movie, and there was this little girl [Linda Blair], a superb actress, and her face got all scratched up and bloody. The thing that really got me was the scene with the crucifix. And then she threw up all this green pasty fluid — gooky, thick stuff that looked almost like hominy grits.”

He paused smiled and said: “Isn't it stupid, walking out on a movie when you're 24 years old?”

I went to “The Exorcist” alone during the first (11 A.M.) showing on a Thursday morning, and it was an experience like I'd never had before in a movie theater. The house was full of course, except for the first two rows. Before the movie began, there was a feeling of tenseness throughout the theater, a random scream here and there, nervous giggling. The young man to my left sat on the edge of his seat throughout the film, and kept shouting, “Oh, wow! Oh, wowl” Now and then he would touch my elbow, as though for reassurance Two girls on my right slouched deep in their seats, covering their faces with their fur chubbies when things ‘got scary. During the exorcism, there was continuous screaming in the theater and it sounded like the old screaming ‐for ‐screaming's‐sake that one used to hear at early Beatles and Rolling Stone concerts. I noticed several people leave in the middle of the film but