10 Movies That Influenced Audiences In Awful Ways
Movies don't kill people; movie fans kill people.
Movie fans can be an impressionable bunch. Take Bird Box for instance, which inspired a "trend" so dumb that it boggles the mind.
In one of Netflix thriller Bird Box's most iconic scenes, Sandra "Oh, is she still doing movies?" Bullock and her children have to pilot their boat through some rapids while all three are blindfolded, because reasons. It was a so-so scene that was made a lot more powerful by what had happened just before it than anything within it.
And then, the sort of people who necessitate 'This product may contain nuts' warnings on packs of peanuts settled down to watch what tabloids briefly dubbed the most terrifying film ever, and this started happening all around the world.
While that's hilarious and I will be watching it on my deathbed, it didn't end there. People left the house blindfolded and wandered into the street. One of the insufferable Paul brothers filmed themselves driving while blindfolded and put it on their child-influencing YouTube channel, and a 17 year old girl in Utah crashed her car while driving with her hat pulled down over her eyes.
With people challenging each other to spend 24 hours blindfolded, it wasn't long before Netflix themselves weighed in and begged people to stop before someone was seriously hurt.
Thankfully most people listened to Big Momma Netflix before anyone was seriously injured, but Bird Box is far from the only film to influence audiences to follow its lead...
10. Interview With The Vampire Led To Real Life Vampirism
When wholesome love story Twilight showed a horny 109-year-old man watching a 17-year-old girl sleep in her bedroom, nobody spared a thought for the more sinister problems that vampire movies bring with them. Like every other cult vampire film before it, Twilight led to a rise in vampire roleplay with schools reporting that students were swapping blood because:
"They have your blood inside of them and you have their blood and so you're closer to each other,"
While there is a likelihood that certain conditions like hepatitis could be passed that way, and a major concern problem with people being marked as property, this was still nothing compared to the effect 1994's Interview With The Vampire had on Daniel Sterling. Already a highly suggestible manic-depressive, Sterling was described as being obsessed with the movie when he saw it, almost to the point of mesmerism.
When Lisa Stellwagen, his girlfriend of eight years, decided to leave him he saw only one logical way to keep her with him. In November 1994, after telling Lisa "I want to kill you and drink your blood. Tonight you are going to die," Sterling grabbed a serrated knife and drove it into her flesh a total of nine times as she lay in bed. He then spent what Lisa describes as "several minutes" drinking her blood before she convinced him to get her some help, telling him that he'd go to prison if she died.
“I was influenced by the movie," Sterling said, from the cell he ended up in anyway, "I enjoyed the movie, but I cannot sit here and blame the movie.”