Yikes! I am extremely sensitive to motion in odd environments, and I did want to see this movie. I guess I won’t.
Cinemagoers sickened by Cloverfield
By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 24/01/2008
Cloverfield, the blockbuster horror film selling out cinemas across America, is making some viewers so sick they are stumbling out of screenings before the end.
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It is not gore or bloodshed that is turning audiences’ stomachs, however, but the jerky hand-held camera footage that makes up most of film. The problem is so bad some cinema chains have posted signs warning audiences they could “experience side effects associated with motion sickness, similar to riding a rollercoaster.”
Film poster for Cloverfield
Cloverfield’s jerky camera techniqes are causing cinematic motion sickness
“I’m really nauseous right now - just hold on for a second,” Erika Hasegawa, 32, told the Los Angeles Times as she staggered out of a screening of Cloverfield and retched into a rubbish bin. “I wish I could get my money back.”
Since the film about a monster attacking New York opened last Friday, reports of nausea and vomiting have been cropping up on internet message boards. “I had to get up and leave the theater for nearly 20 minutes just to keep from hurling,” wrote one filmgoer on the popular film website IMDB.
“My wife had to stop watching multiple times. The first girl we spoke to after the movie felt queasy. Someone was throwing up in the bathroom afterward,” wrote Florida blogger Dan Rua. “People are going to be sick: Although I came out fine, this movie should come with a warning.”
The thriller, produced by Lost creator JJ Abrams and promoted with an online viral marketing campaign that captivated film fans across the world, made over 45 million dollars on its opening weekend, becoming the most successful January release of all time.
Due out in the UK on February 1, the film follows five young New Yorkers who video themselves as they flee a giant monster that is destroying the city. It is almost entirely made up of hand-held footage, a technique famously used in the Blair Witch Project, the 1999 faux documentary that also had viewers struggling to keep down their popcorn.
The style was described “chillingly effective” by The Hollywood Reporter, which praised the film’s “claustrophobic intensity”, although other critics have accused the filmmakers of “insensitivity” for visual references to the September 11 terror attacks on Manhattan.
AMC Theatres, a nationwide chain, has put up signs outside hundreds of cinemas warning of possible motion sickness.
Bloggers have also posted tips on how to watch the film without feeling ill such as “once you are in the theater, if you start to feel like you are going to throw up, look away from the screen and focus on a wall, the next row of chairs, anything that is not moving.”
“This is a classic case of vertigo,” Dr. Michael Stewart, chairman of ear, nose and throat medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, told CNN. “You can look around and feel like things are moving, when they aren’t.”