Times Horror Movies Sent Someone To The Hospital

Horror films can get our adrenaline pumping, but sometimes, these thrills can get all too real. You sometimes hear a great new horror movie is sending folks to the hospital by scaring the bejeezus out of them and you wonder whether it really happened or if it's all just marketing. To help you figure it out, we've gathered some examples of times when horror movies actually prompted real-life medical attention.

Speaking of disgusting body horror, did you know The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) caused a woman to faint? Movieline's Jen Yamato wrote about her experience at the premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2011 and how festival founder Tim League joked about there being EMTs on hand in case people got sick. Though it was a joke, Yamato's seat buddy actually did faint and had to wait for paramedics after she came to. But what would you really expect from a sequel to The Human Centipede?

What goes with blood, guts, and gore? If you answered "fainting," you'd be correct. The cannibal film Raw premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and apparently caused filmgoers to faint and vomit. Adam Gabbatt of the Guardian reported that paramedics had to be called in because some scenes featured realistic biting, lacerations, and wounds, and the sight was too much for audience members. If you're going to watch a movie that revolves around cannibalism, it's probably a safe bet that you're going to see some stuff that makes you queasy. Take our advice and don't make it part of a "dinner and a movie" date.

By the time we got around to Saw III, you'd have thought people would have built up a tolerance to all of the gross, violent images from the first two films. Obviously this was not the case, as the BBC reported that moviegoers at a UK theater fainted and emergency services were called out three times in one night because of the film. A woman in her 20s needed to be hospitalized, while others were treated at the scene. Apparently the film was just too much for them.

The 1932 classic Freaks is one of the original horror movies, released even before the Motion Production Code guidelines went into effect in 1934. As you can imagine from the title and the short clip of the intro, it centers on members of a carnival "freak show" in the early 1900s. According to John Patterson of the Guardian, the original test screening was so horrific that a woman claimed the film made her miscarry. Just imagine how people back then would react to some of the horror movies we have these days.

While billed as a drama, 127 Hours quickly finds itself in survival horror movie territory when rock climber Aron Ralston (James Franco) falls down a crevice, his arm firmly trapped beneath a rock. Ralston didn't tell anybody where he was going, so his life was in his own hands. Literally. Using his rock climbing gear and a dull knife, Ralston was forced to break and then amputate his own arm and eventually walk himself to safety. 

The self-amputation was so graphic that Movieline constructed an entire timeline of each incident where people got sick during screenings of Danny Boyle's 127 Hours around the world. At London Film Festival a number of attendees vomited and were taken to the hospital. A woman had a seizure while watching 127 Hours at a Producers Guild screening in Hollywood. And the Toronto Film Festival reported several fainters and one person who had a seizure. At Telluride Film Festival, one woman had a panic attack and another man fainted; both were taken to the hospital. But luckily nothing needed to be amputated. 

In the movie that started the handheld camera and found footage horror movie sub-genre, three young film students are out in the woods around Burkittsville, Maryland to investigate the mysterious Blair Witch. At first it's all fun and games for Heather (Heather Donahue), Josh (Joshua Leonard), and Mike (Michael C. Williams) as they interview locals about the Blair Witch legend as well as Rustin Parr, a man who lived in the woods who kidnapped and killed children in pairs. But the documentary quickly turns into survival horror as the three youngsters find themselves set upon by dark forces each night, leading up to The Blair Witch Project's horrifying conclusion. 

Unlike some of the other films in this list, it wasn't on-screen gore or violence that made audiences sick while watching The Blair Witch Project. Using handheld Super-8 and 16mm cameras, audiences got motion sickness from the jerky and all-too-realistic filming style that caused people to throw up. The problem was so bad and so quickly that cinemas were forced to include a warning about the movie before people went to see it. But people getting sick did not deter audiences from seeing the movie, making it one of the cheapest films to make and one of the most profitable films of all time after its release.

In a tale of gruesome parental loss, Madeline (Jordan Ladd) and Michael (Stephen Park) are in a car accident that takes the life of Michael and her unborn baby, Grace. Madeline's way to cope with the grief is to carry her baby to term anyway, against medical recommendations. Within minutes of being born, the stillborn baby seems to revive, but with a taste for blood rather than mother's milk. The child attracts putrid flies and cannot tolerate water, bleeding when Madeline tries to bathe her. The situation gets progressively worse in this heavy metaphor for postpartum depression and psychosis. 

It's not often that a horror movie makes evil villains out of a baby. There's is something profoundly unnatural about the notion that makes this subject matter hard to touch. So it's no surprise that people would faint at Grace's premiere in Sundance due to the graphic nature of the baby's violence on screen, particularly when she goes from drinking her mother's blood to literally devouring her mom's flesh. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. 

This incident is actually the most hardcore—and probably one of the strangest. According to Adam Boult of the Daily Telegraph, a 65-year-old man from Andhra Pradesh, India died after attending a screening of The Conjuring 2 at the Sri Balasubramaniar Cinema in the town of Tiruvannamalai. He was reported to have been suffering from chest pains towards the end of the movie, fainted, and was then pronounced dead after he was taken to Old Government Hospital. Now, dying at the end of a film is pretty strange already, but apparently the man's body—and the person in charge of handling it—both disappeared. This kind of thing might not be the best marketing, especially for the more superstitious among us.

In Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus, Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) teams up with the Weyland Corporation and the crew of the Prometheus spacecraft to travel to the far reaches of the galaxy in order to locate who she calls "The Engineers," who she believes created the Human race. What they find is the same site we saw in James Cameron's Aliens, but years before that film took place and with a differently evolved Xenomorph creature than in the original films. Dr. Shaw is impregnated with a Xenomorph by power hungry android David (Michael Fassbender) who intends to breed an army that he can rule over. Once Dr. Shaw realizes what's growing inside her, she finds a surgical bay to remove it in what is a staggeringly gruesome extraction from her belly. She staples herself up and goes on to survive much more violence, including kicks to her raw wound. 

This scene proved too intense for some viewers. One man claimed to have passed out for a full five minutes while his panicked girlfriend called for help, according to Escapist Magazine. Meanwhile, a teenage boy in Australia was rushed to the hospital after having an epileptic seizure during this self-imposed cesarean section. It's almost funny it was men who passed out during this scene. Women are like, "Pshaw. My monthly cramps are worse than that."

In 2009, Australian film director Jonathan Auf Der Heide released his film Van Diemen's Land based on the actual history of the island of Tasmania, which was used as a European prison colony beginning in the early 1800s. The film features a group of prisoners in 1822 who break out of the prison and land in the Tasmanian wilderness, only to be forced to cannibalize each other since they have no survival skills. Sarah Island is known for its variety of natural barriers, like unforgiving rock passes and wild bodies of water that made the remote site perfect for a prison. Infamous "cannibal convict" Alexander Pearce — played here by Oscar Redding — was the only survivor both in the film and in reality. 

The idea of cannibalism generally makes even the strongest stomach queasy. But the graphic depictions in Auf Der Heide's film were so much that two people at a screening in New Zealand found themselves throwing up in the aisles. Auf Der Heide also noted that several people fainted during the first killing scene, which surprised him since he felt he had taken an understated and almost gothic approach to the violence on screen as well as the source material it was based on. It just goes to show that no matter how artfully you might present horrors like cannibalism on screen, it's still going to make people hurl just from the thought of it.