A24’s upcoming horror film Hereditary has already traumatized audiences at Sundance, creeped people out at SXSW, and been deemed “a new generation’s The Exorcist.” The film drops in June, but its deeply disturbing trailers, featuring dead birds, freaky ass dolls, and someone completely engulfed in flames, prove the thing is likely going to be one of the more terrifying movies of 2018—something a bunch of kids and their parents discovered accidentally at a screening of Peter Rabbit on Wednesday.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a theater in Perth, Australia, devolved into complete pandemonium after a trailer full of families were treated to one of the film’s horrifying trailers. Parents and kids hoping to catch a screening of the allergy-shaming bunny in Peter Rabbit, were given a taste of Hereditary‘s “pure emotional terrorism” before their feature presentation.
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“It was dreadful. Very quickly you could tell this was not a kid’s film. Parents were yelling at the projectionist to stop, covering their kids’ eyes and ears,” an unnamed parent told Australia’s WAtoday. “Some parents fled the cinema with their kids in tow.”
Eventually, the woman said, a staff member rushed in and called up to the projection room to get the guy to shut off the scenes of a kid banging his head bloody against a desk, a girl cutting the head off a dead bird, and ants swarming a sleeping body. She said that the theater offered up some free movie passes for the inconvenience, but the damage was already done.
“A lot of the kids were upset,” the parent said. “And if you think back to your own childhood, you remember things that scared you when you saw them for the first time.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I understand mistakes happen,” she added. “But surely there should be checks to make sure trailers like that don’t get shown.”
Needless to say, it doesn’t seem like anyone in the theater that day will be using their free movie passes to see Hereditary when it debuts on June 8.
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