The book was terrifying not so much because it was about terror, but because it was about fearlessness, the fearlessness of the fanatical. The utter willingness to die. This struck a chord because people began to realize this was something impossible to fight in any conventional way. How can you harm people who are ready to die? How can you stop people whose nihilism immunizes them against any possible threat?
From:
http://www.bluecoupe.com/DVD/blacksunday.htmlBlack Sunday is an amazingly entertaining film -- but watching it in 2003 isn't the same as watching it in 1977. With the passing of time, what was once dark fantasy is now harsh reality. Now we know what happens when a plan like this one succeeds. We know how that feels. We know how many thousands die and what the physical site would look like after the event, so much dust and twisted metal and pockmarked earth. We know very well the psychological devastation that comes of such things. Oddly, the horror of Black September's goal, to kill 80,000 people in a Miami football stadium -- a hook that could easily have been written off as simply a thriller's central plot device -- is intensified many-fold by the stark contrast of what happened on September 11. That day's actual body count pushes the tension associated with the potential of the film's much bigger one. The result is a strange, disturbing double echo, where a film is mirrored by a real-life event, and a real-life event which seems to have been foreseen in a prescient film.
From:
http://www.bluecoupe.com/DVD/blacksunday.html