9 Horror Movies That Got Too Real As You Watched
5. Dracula (1931) Makes Women Faint
Almost a full century before some of the newer movies on this list, Tod Browning's 1931 Dracula was an early example of the horror genre's ability to affect audience members on a deeply primal level.
Case in point, the film - which, of course, revolves around a vampire preying primarily upon a young woman - reportedly left female audience members in particular so distraught that they fainted and had to be carried out of the cinema.
Even accepting the somewhat apocryphal nature of these reports, and the extreme unlikelihood that the film only affected women, it is nevertheless fitting that a movie about a force of nature which stalks its victims had a real, paralytic effect on viewers almost a full century ago, to the extent that they couldn't even exit the cinema under their own power.
Universal was quick to emphasise such reports in their marketing, resulting in the film becoming the studio's most profitable release of 1931.