Despite no end of displeasure and disgust – from a petition put to (and rejected by) UK parliament in 2021 to make warnings obligatory, to a “coalition” of film and television viewers making a stand against the stomach-churning trend – there is no sign the flood of vomit currently sweeping cinema is set to be staunched.
The dam was first burst in 1973, with The Exorcist’s tide of pea soup. Since then, the trope of copious projectile vomiting in cinema has spread contagiously, finding itself in a reliably constant spew of horrors, then comedies, released from the mid-1970s onwards.