Blood, guts, and self-mutilation: 10 movies so horrific they caused audiences to pass out
There’s a certain section of filmgoers so determined that no matter how bad or gruesome a movie is, for whatever reason, they’ll never abandon their seat before the credits come up and walk out.
It’s an admirable perseverance and an opinion not shared as a consensus, with plenty of films over the years having instigated mass walkouts for a variety of reasons. On certain occasions, though, the decision on whether or not to stick with a feature until the very end comes not from the mind but the body.
Fainting isn’t something that can be predicted ahead of time, and it’s definitely not the sort of thing closely associated with a trip to the big screen, but that hasn’t prevented a number of titles from robbing folks of watching from beginning to end of their own volition.
As expected, the majority of them feature extreme cases of on-screen gore, but not all of them. One of them is even an established classic of cinema, in fact, not witnessing greatness unfold was enough to stop a loss of consciousness.
10 movies that caused audiences to pass out:
10. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)
Quentin Tarantino‘s crime classic packs plenty of violence into its running time, but on the surface, there doesn’t seem to be anything capable of causing widespread fainting in the aisles unless, of course, any viewer has a phobia of needles.
Trypanophobia is a condition that affects a lot of people, many of whom clearly weren’t prepared for the scene where Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace gets one plunged directly into her chest cavity to restart her heart after a drug overdose, which ensured Pulp Fiction couldn’t even finish its world premiere without people passing out.
As star Eric Stoltz recalled, “They stopped the film, we were all in a box seat in the balcony, and I was mortified,” with the actor indirectly responsible after playing a key part in the scene that proved too much for many to handle.
9. Goodnight Mommy (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, 2014)
While the turgid remake probably didn’t have the same effect given its status as an uninspired re-tread of what came before, the original Goodnight Mommy struck such terror into the hearts of those watching that the filmmakers wore it as a badge of honour.
“Two people fainted,” co-director Severin Fiala proudly told IndieWire. “That’s the best compliment we’ve had so far.” Even more disturbingly, that came before the movie had even reached its halfway point, not that violence and nightmarish imagery need to be restricted to the third act.
An unnerving chiller, Goodnight Mommy finds young twin brothers becoming increasingly convinced the woman who recently returned home from facial reconstructive surgery isn’t their mother at all. There are plenty of twists and turns packed within, which would have gone completely unnoticed by those who passed out long before then.
8. Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016)
A coming-of-age body horror with a cannibalistic twist, a feral flick that finds a veterinary student and staunch vegetarian discover she’s got a taste for human flesh was never going to be an easy watch, even for those with a strong stomach and appetite for horror cinema.
As anyone made of stern enough stuff to get through it from beginning to end can attest, Julia Ducournau’s Raw is an excellent and very well-made film. However, it’s also graphic to the point of inducing nausea, so much so that the emergency services were called to its very first screening.
Several faintings were reported, and while the filmmaker was adamant it wasn’t her intention to induce unconsciousness, it was hardly an unexpected revelation when Raw is a very difficult thing to endure without at least one guttural reaction.
7. The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
Future generations will never again get to experience the unique pleasures of The Blair Witch Project, which weaponised such an effective marketing campaign in the early stages of the internet era that countless viewers went into the film believing it was 100% real.
It’s an impossible thing to pull off these days, not that every person who turned it into one of the most profitable releases in cinema history got to witness the found footage favourite unfolding in its entirety, with a combination of spine-chilling fear and motion sickness causing plenty of issues.
Fainting, sickness, dizziness, headaches, and fainting became par for the course, with one cinema chain in the United States even placing posters outside screenings to make customers aware in no uncertain terms there was no guarantee they’d emerged unscathed on the other side.
6. The Green Inferno (Eli Roth, 2013)
As the godfather of the torture porn movement, Eli Roth was very familiar with pushing cinema into its most extreme depictions of violence and gore, so he was understandably thrilled that The Green Inferno had the potential to make people faint.
Celebrating the development, Roth was quick to voice his pride in crafting a horror movie so intense that it presented an insurmountable struggle for at least one member of the audience. It’s easy to see why, though, because his frenzied tale of cannibalism running amok was a new level of barbarity, even for a filmmaker like Roth.
Stephen King didn’t have any problems when he labelled The Green Inferno as “a glorious throwback to the drive-in movies of my youth,” a double-pronged assault on attention-grabbing headlines that made it a must-see for those desperate to know if it lived up to the hype.
5. The Last House on the Left (Wes Craven, 1972)
Every controversy can often become an opportunity, something Wes Craven used to his advantage when his debut feature, The Last House on the Left, was banned outright for being too gruesome for a wide audience.
Banned in the United Kingdom well into the 1990s, the harrowing story of two young women being subjected to a horrendous ordeal at the hands of their kidnappers gained infamy and notoriety in equal measure, which then turned into a major selling point.
Capitalising on its burgeoning reputation, The Last House on the Left leaned into its faint-happy reputation with a brand new tagline: “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: ‘It’s only a movie’, ‘only a movie.'”
4. Asylum Blackout (Alex Courtès, 2011)
The fact Asylum Blackout was co-written by S. Craig Zahler in his first credited film says plenty about it, considering the filmmaker would go on to helm the exceedingly graphic Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Bone Tomahawk.
It is literally a story about the inmates running the asylum, the cooks in the kitchen at a facility for the criminally insane end up being locked in with the deranged inhabitants during a thunderstorm, and it isn’t long before all hell breaks loose.
During its premiere screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, at least two people fainted during the 85-minute ordeal, with the body of one patron specifically deciding the moment when one of the caterers was strapped to a cooker and agonisingly burned alive was the right place to draw the line.
3. Saw III (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2006)
It’s not often that unremarkable sequels end up making national news for battering their audience into submission with increasingly escalating scenes of rampant gore, but Saw III accomplished it by dialling the franchise’s signature traps up to new levels of depravity.
The East of England Ambulance Service was forced to release a statement to the BBC outlining its terms and conditions as a result of Saw III overworking the emergency services. “If you know you’re squeamish, don’t go,” was the advice, which was not adhered to on opening night.
One woman was hospitalised, and two others were treated by paramedics after fainting at the same screening in Stevenage, while another collapsed in Peterborough “due to the film’s content.” If that all happened the first day it was in cinemas, then it surely would have been far from the last bout of bodies dropping like flies.
2. 127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2010)
Anyone who’s seen 127 Hours will know exactly which scene in Danny Boyle‘s biographical drama caused incidents all over the world, with the unflinching and excruciating moment in question enough to cause shivers just thinking about it.
It was a pivotal part of Aron Ralston’s traumatic experience, but that doesn’t mean everybody was expecting Boyle to be quite so graphic when it came to shooting the sequence where the trapped adventurer hacks his arm off with a blunt knife.
The sickening sound design and snapping of sinew and tendon was too much for many, with three people fainting and one suffering a seizure during its premiere a sign of things to come. It was a part of the story that couldn’t be omitted, but still, the way it was depicted was nothing short of galling.
1. Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
Clearly, Ducournau is not one for creating an easy experience, with her follow-up to Raw yielding a Palme d’Or winner like no other after the film was deemed the standout of the Cannes Film Festival witnessed fainting on a colossal scale when it began rolling out worldwide.
According to reports from the Australian premiere in Sydney, there were at least 13 people who lost consciousness during Titane, while additional screenings around the world echoed that sentiment with the added bonus of panic attacks and vomiting.
Provocative to the point of being disturbing, Ducournau’s reputation now precedes her after only two full-length works of cinema, with the third best off coming with a disclaimer for anyone unfamiliar with her oeuvre that there’s a distinct possibility a medical malady is incoming.
