Annabelle Comes Home: Man Dies While Watching Film In Thailand
Talk about life imitating art.
A 77-year old British man reportedly passed away while vacationing in Thailand during a screening of the hit horror flick Annabelle Comes Home. No official cause of death has been reported, but the incident left fellow moviegoers in shock. (via Daily Mail)
The unnamed man's untimely demise occurred at a theater in Pattaya, Thailand, and wasn't noticed until the film had ended and the lights had come up. The unfortunate theater patron's body was discovered by the woman who had been sitting next to him, which would have been profoundly disturbing in any event — but, as one might imagine, it must have been all the more startling considering the film she had just finished watching.
The woman alerted the theater's staff, who quickly called emergency medical services to the scene. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, and his body was quickly covered up and ushered through a side door to a waiting ambulance.
One local resident, who arrived to attend a screening after the one in question, went on record to reporters about the scene outside the theater. "There were some people at the entrance talking with staff. They were in the cinema where the man died, and they were very upset," she said. "They were shocked by what had happened. Some people had been sitting near the dead man... The cinema staff were very concerned and they tried to prevent anybody from seeing what was happening. We were prohibited from taking pictures."
Well, that's only appropriate. A police spokesman addressed the incident with the following statement: "Police were notified of the death at 8pm inside the cinema in a shopping mall. From the preliminary investigation, it was not known how the foreign man had died but doctors will conduct an autopsy to establish the true cause of death. We are not looking for anybody else connected to the death. We do not believe there was suspicious foul play."
It's not known at this time whether the man had any relationship to the woman who discovered his body. While it's certainly a shocking turn of events, it may shock you even more to learn that this kind of thing isn't exactly rare — it happens all the time, and it's not even the first time someone has expired while watching a Conjuring Universe film.
In 2016, the Times of India reported that a 65-year old man had begun complaining of chest pains during a screening of The Conjuring 2 in Tiruvannamalai, India, before fainting. He was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead upon arrival; in a strange twist to the story, his body — along with the person tasked with transporting it to the morgue — then promptly vanished.
Other films during which theater patrons have expired over the years include Jaws, Avatar, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, and The Passion of the Christ (during which not one, but two moviegoers found themselves being ushered off to the next life). It's something of a morbid Hollywood tradition stretching all the way back to 1932, when a woman reportedly threatened to sue MGM Studios after suffering a miscarriage during a test screening of Tod Browning's infamous pre-code horror film Freaks.
At any rate, critics have labeled Annabelle Comes Home as quite the haunted house thrill ride, but it seems unlikely that the film is responsible for actually scaring the poor man to death. Our guess is that the autopsy will reveal that he passed away of natural causes, but he certainly picked a heck of a time and place to do so.