8 Gruesome Movie Scenes That Made Audiences Sick

Luis Bunuel once claimed that he kept rocks in his pockets during the first screening of Un Chien Andalou in case the crowd didn’t like what it saw. Whether or not that’s actually true, the audience reaction was never so bad that it came to violence. Apparently cutting open an eyeball wasn’t a real biggie in the 1920s.

Of course, none of that changes how ridiculously hard that short film is to watch. It’s grotesque, nauseating, and a great starting point for decades of filmmakers continuing to make audiences freak the hell out. That grand tradition was continued with a second fainting at a screening of V/H/S and it’s a tradition we’d like to celebrate with 8 movies that caused some strong physical reactions.

Prometheus

Anyone who has seen the movie already knows which scene is most likely the culprit here. After a casual five minutes of internet searching I found two personal accounts of people passing out during this film, as well as a story about a boy having a seizure. Pretty messed up… well… not as messed up as performing automated surgery on yourself in order to remove an alien baby… but it’s close.

It was a scene that brought horror back to sci-fi – showing that just because something is a prequel doesn’t mean it has to be unoriginal. With all the plot holes you can take from this film, it still does exactly what it set out to do.

127 Hours

You can watch limb after limb being torn off in any given horror film out there and not feel a thing – but the moment someone comes along and actually puts that injury into context it’s a way different story. 127 Hours did just that. It did it very slowly and very seriously, and in result we got to see one of the harder to watch moments out there. Don’t believe me? Ask the three people who fainted during the first screening, or perhaps the one dude who suffered a seizure from it. At its most relevant the fainting total went up to 13 as the movie screened across the country.

It’s the double whammy of a situation that not only appeals to the phobias of your average arm-loving citizen but also has an extra layer of intense claustrophobic terror. Personally – the worst part of the entire ordeal wasn’t the scene itself, but everything leading up to it. Anyone going into this film knows damn well how it’s going to end, so watching the struggle that leads up to it is like watching people try to keep the Titanic afloat. You know from the start what needs to be done, and you know that it won’t be pretty.

The Exorcist

This movie had everything. According to a 1974 article by Judy Klemsrud in the New York Times, “It’s been reported that once inside the theater, a number of moviegoers vomited at the very graphic goings-on on screen. Others fainted, or left the theater, nauseous and trembling, before the film was half over. Several people had heart attacks, a guard told me. One woman even had a miscarriage, he said.”

There were even riots outside the cinema as people scrambled to get a seat.

Of course this is one of those things were it’s hard to tell truth from fiction. Director William Friedkin himself tried to downplay the problems the film was causing saying, “I’ve heard reports of people fainting or throwing up during the picture, but I don’t think there has been a significant number of such occurrence.” But even at it’s very modest, the reports about audience reactions involve – at the very least – vomiting and fainting.

Visit FilmSchoolRejects.com for the full story

Source URL: http://filmschoolrejects.com