Cheer screening

A cheer screening (Japanese: 応援上映, Hepburn: ouen jōei) is a type of film screening associated with Japanese cinema that encourages audience participation through cheering, typically in the form of applause, singing, and the shouting of responses to statements made by characters. Other terms used to describe this category of screening include cheering screening (チアリング上映, chiaringu jōei),^[1][2] vocal screening (発声型上映, hassei-gata jōei),^[3] screaming screening (絶叫上映, zekkyō jōei) ^[4] and voice screening (声出し上映, koedashi jōei).^[5] When applied to Indian films, it is often called a masala screening (マサラ上映, masara jōei).

While participatory film screenings have an international history and context (most famously in midnight movie screenings of the 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show), "cheer screenings" as a category gained particular popularity in Japan beginning in the early- to mid-2010s. While cheer screenings are most commonly associated with anime films, they have been held for anime and non-anime films that are both Japanese and non-Japanese in origin.