How Movies Make Us Crazy Emotional

The Crazy Emotional

Everyone enjoys some good movies online or cinema. Sometimes we like to watch a touching, heart-warming flick that grants us the chance to shed a few tears, and sometimes we want to get our heart pumping with exciting action or a terrifying horror movie. As with anything, there is a vast spectrum to how any given movie will affect us. Maybe we’ll let loose a tear or two, or maybe the story will strike a chord and leave us curled up on the couch sobbing. The fact that we know the movie is fake often doesn’t even seem to matter.


It turns out there’s a scientific reason that our brains respond so emotionally when we get caught up in an enjoyable movie. In Jeff Zack’s book Flicker: Your Brain on Movies, he describes brain cells called mirror neurons that kick into gear when we watch other people. When someone else smiles, we want to smile.

Movies make us react. Sometimes, crazy things happen when our hearts are pumping and emotions are running high. Here are some notable examples of emotions getting out of hand at movie theaters.

Star Wars Fans Take Spoilers Seriously

Everyone was excited when Star Wars: The Force Awakens finally hit theaters. So excited that anything that might spoil the movie was confronted with a wall of outrage, even if the reason was a technical glitch.

In one movie theater in Hollywood, technical issues caused the movie theater to staff to stop the movie briefly to fix the problems. Staff told the audience they would rewind the movie five minutes to make up for the glitch and missed moments. However, when the movie was rebooted, they had actually skipped fifteen minutes ahead.

The audience, geared up with excitement, was mortified, believing they had missed important scenes and were being presented with spoilers. People began shouting, screaming, throwing popcorn, and “running out of the theatre with their ears covered.”
Most likely mortified by the chaos, the theater issued a full refund and free vouchers to members of the audience.

Star Wars Fans Take Spoilers Seriously

The Classic Horror of the Exorcist

The horror film The Exorcist came out in movie theaters in December 1973. The release of the movie can be described as a memorable cultural event, considering how some audiences responded to what was shown on the screen.

The movie depicts the happenings after a little girl is possessed by a demon and a priest is brought in by the mother. This turned out to be too much for certain audience goers, who were reported to be fainting and crying while they watched the film.

There is even video evidence of this preserved on the internet, allowing us to catch a glimpse of the fright experienced by moviegoers in 1973.

The Uplifting Star Wars Trailer

How about a positive emotion? And another example of how much Star Wars can affect people’s emotions. The first trailer of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace debuted in select theaters on November 18th, 1998. This may seem unremarkable now, but remember at this point it had been over two decades since there had been a Star Wars film released. Also, the Internet was still fairly new, and YouTube didn’t exist to look up endless movie trailers.

Some people attended movies just to see the Star Wars movie preview. Fans in the audience cheered loudly from the very beginning of the trailer. There were tears of joy. Imagine that happening at a preview before a movie nowadays! Maybe one day there will be such a sought after movie event that will make people cry tears of joy at a movie trailer.

Man Collapses During the Conjuring 2

We’ve already seen that people fainted during the screening of The Exorcist in the 1970s, but don’t think people still don’t get that worked up today. In fact, sometimes movies still get your heart beating a little too fast.

During a screening of James Wan’s The Conjuring 2, a 65 year old man collapsed during the climax of the movie and was later pronounced dead.

It was enough for some people to claim their homes had become haunted simply by watching the movie online at home. Ridiculous, maybe, but Warner Bros. encouraged this sort of thinking by hiring actual priests to come to screenings to bless the audiences.