A teenage boy in Australia got more thrills and chills than he bargained for when he came down with seizures after a particularly gruesome scene in the new Alien prequel Prometheus.
The Australian teenage boy had to be rushed to the hospital right in the middle of the new, bone-chilling film Prometheus, which is guaranteed to send viewers into adrenaline overload. Poor kid: not only did he get an ER visit he didn’t bargain on, he missed the film’s ending.
The sci-fi thriller is rated R in the U.S. but in Australia it received an M, meaning minors can see the film unaccompanied by an adult. Not that this would have made a difference either way.
The boy went into seizures after a particularly harrowing scene – spoiler alert! – in which Noomi Rapace gives herself an emergency Cesarean section to pull out a squirming alien.
Despite the sensationalism of the medical episode, this isn’t the first time a movie-goer has collapsed under the spell of a harrowing movie scene. In 2010, one audience member vomited and two fainted during screenings of James Franco’s 127 Hours. And several people were reported to have passed out watching Uma Thurman’s character get her adrenaline shot in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
In fact, there is a legend going around that Tarantino himself was in the audience during one screening in which a filmgoer collapsed in a seizure – something he might have been secretly relished. After all, bodily recoils from horrific make-believe scenes are testimony to the genius of the writer and director’s creativity.
Prometheus is the new kid on the block in the Alien franchise. According to director Ridley Scott (of the original 1979 Alien), though the film shares “strands of Alien’s DNA, so to speak”, and takes place in the same universe, Prometheus explores its own mythology and ideas.
The story is set in the late 21st century and centers on the crew of the spaceship Prometheus as they follow a star map discovered among the remnants of ancient Earth cultures. Led to a distant world endowed with an advanced civilization, the crew seeks the origins of humanity, but instead stumbles into a threat that could cause the extinction of the human race.
Now that is a great set-up for a wild adrenaline roller coaster ride. Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green and Charlize Theron star as the new ensemble caught screaming in their spacesuits.