The ‘Best Picture’ nominee that caused countless viewers to pass out
Being nominated for ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards is among the highest honours any movie can receive, with the voting body deciding that the film in question is good enough to be named among the very best of the previous 12 months.
There are only a maximum of ten titles every year that can be bestowed with such an honour, but one contender ended up proving so difficult to sit through that an alarming number of people couldn’t make it all the way to the credits. Whether it was fainting, vomiting, or a general sense of ‘nope, not for me’, the retention rate for audiences was decidedly less than 100%.
Horror rarely finds itself in the mix for ‘Best Picture’ bar the odd exception, including Get Out, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense, or The Silence of the Lambs, but the film that caused such widespread unconsciousness, occasional vomiting, and many instances of folks simply excusing themselves from screenings because they’d had enough wasn’t scary in the conventional sense at all. In fact, it was a biopic.
Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours retold the harrowing story of Aron Ralston, an experienced climber, mountaineer, canyoner, and adventurer who literally found himself trapped between a rock and a hard place during what should have been a routine solo venture in Utah.
When a boulder falls on his arm, Ralston eventually realises after five days of being stuck with nowhere to go that the only way to extricate himself from the predicament is to hack his own arm off with a blunt knife and then set out on what turned out to be a seven-mile trek to safety. Anyone who was expecting Boyle to shy away from the grisly set piece was in for a shock, though, and there was clearly a lot of unprepared viewers.
The world premiere didn’t even manage to go off without a hitch, with one person fainting the very first time 127 Hours was shown to the world. Somebody had a panic attack at the second screening, which set the tone for things to come when Boyle’s unflinching feature reportedly led to three faintings and a seizure at the Toronto International Film Festival before another two passed out at a screening held by Pixar, and another bit the dust and lost consciousness at the Mill Valley Film Festival, with paramedics also called to a showing at the Producers Guild.
Further reports emerged of vomiting and fainting at the London Film Festival, with other audience members opting to just get up and leave once Ralston hacked his own arm right through the bone. There was another seizure at the Los Angeles premiere, although Boyle did at least address the gathered crowd to claim it was caused by issues related to diabetes and not the harrowing snap of tendon and sinew.
Unsurprisingly, the official company line was that this was not the desired reaction. “I would prefer that people not pass out, it’s not a plus,” Fox Searchlight co-president Stephen Gilula told the Los Angeles Times. “We don’t see a particular publicity value in it.” Not that it deterred the Academy, who ended up shortlisting 127 Hours for an additional five Oscars, including ‘Best Actor’ and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, and it managed to recoup its production budget three times over at the box office thanks to patrons made of stronger stuff.
