The Screaming Room

In 1962, more than a hundred children and factory workers were ushered into a Havana movie theater for a secret screening. Within minutes, they were screaming, convulsing, and clawing to escape. The film was never shown again—and its existence swiftly erased from Cuban records.

This episode reconstructs the lost story of The Screaming Room, a propaganda experiment gone catastrophically wrong during the Cold War. Drawn from declassified medical reports, eyewitness accounts, and archival CIA cables, it unravels a real event long dismissed as rumor: the day a film broke an audience’s mind.

The footage is gone. But what happened inside the Payret Cinema still echoes.