Box-office gross: 15 films that made audiences sick

Terrifier 3 has had viewers twisting in their seats – and dashing for the loos. But it’s not the only horror to have had the same effect

Some films will drain your tear-ducts; others will leave your body convulsed with laughter. But the rarest – perhaps even the highest – physical response to a work of cinema is vomit.
The latest film to elicit this rarest of reactions is Terrifier 3. The sequel to 2022’s Terrifier 2 and, well, Terrifier a few years before – no expense spared on the marketing, clearly – it follows the further blood-soaked antics of Art the Clown. This instalment has a festive bent, seeing the murderous clown menace a community as the Christmas holidays approach. 
But it seems audiences have failed to see the jolly side. The first British screening reportedly saw 11 walkouts – with nine during its opening scene. The film’s PR team also confirmed – in what may be the strangest boast in public relations history – that “at least one” audience member is known to have vomited. Alas, they were unable to ascertain whether this was the result of the film’s gross-out horror scenes or merely the result of a dodgy Chinese beforehand. 
Nonetheless, for a certain type of film – and, it must be admitted, a certain type of audience member – vomiting is a mark of honour. Some puke-worthy pictures are now acknowledged as modern masterpieces; others are Terrifier 3. 
These, then, are other 15 films that have left audiences running for the washrooms. 
The film that began it all. Less than two minutes into Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s surrealist short – a major influence on Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon – we watch a woman’s eye being cut open with a razor, in extreme close-up. As the vitreous fluid oozes out, it’s hard not to look away. The film has its fair share of disturbing images (including a man watching ants crawl out of a festering hole in his hand) but it’s best remembered for that eyeball. With one cut, Buñuel sliced open the boundaries of what was acceptable on film. Tellingly, the hand holding the razor is his own.
This notorious pre-Code horror used actual circus performers with deformities for its nightmarish tale of a carnival sideshow dwarf who is seduced and murdered by a trapeze artist. The film ends with one of the characters made into a sickening ‘human duck’: tongue removed, eyeball gouged out and arms and legs chopped off. 
The film was so controversial that it was banned in the UK for 30 years, though subsequently critics have reassessed the picture declaring it “one of the most compassionate films ever made” for its anti-eugenics message. Nonetheless, the original screenings saw numerous walkouts and complaints. In fact, one woman sued MGM, claiming that watching it had induced a miscarriage.  
“When I walked out after 50 minutes,” wrote a New York Times critic in 1972, “one girl had just been dismembered with a machete.” The same reviewer labelled the film “sickening” and “repulsive”, but Wes Craven’s low-budget tale of rape and revenge has far more than momentary shock value.
It’s not just revolting, but morally unsettling. Thanks to the unflinching it-could-happen-here realism of the second half – in which a gang of murderous thugs worm their way into an ordinary middle-class home – audiences are made to feel queasy about their own role as voyeurs, and quite literally sick with guilt. In the words of the film’s poster “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: it’s only a movie… only a movie… only a movie…”
John Waters’s midnight movie has it all: castration, coprophilia and two characters who have sex while crushing a live chicken between them – all painted in the director’s signature gaudy technicolour. As a smart gimmick, a few cinemas offered audiences free “Pink Phlegmingo” vomit-bags. 
For added sensory overkill, in 2009 the Sydney Underground Film Festival screened Pink Flamingos in nauseating “Odorama”, complete with scratch’n’sniff cards.
After more than four decades, William Friedkin’s classic still has the power to shock; its most notorious scene involves the sight of a young girl, possessed by a demon, violently masturbating with a crucifix.
Young Regan’s demonic projectile vomiting has been known to provoke more of the same from viewers; from the first American press-screenings onwards, there were reports of walk-outs, faintings and even a few people throwing up in the cinema. When it finally opened in Britain, the St John Ambulance was called to provide stretchers and medical support outside cinemas, in case any punters fainted – or worse.
Most horrors aspire to terrify their audiences; a few, though, are so disturbing that they end up unsettling their cast and crew. But Tobe Hooper’s masterful debut was one of them. 
Made on a miniscule budget, and filmed on grimy celluloid, the filming conditions were almost as arduous as the torture Leatherface subjects the unwary teenagers to. Made in the baking Texas summer sun, the cast were forced to wear the same clothes for weeks on and, by the time the climatic dinner party scene was filmed, the scent of unwashed bodies and rotting flesh – many of the props were made with real animal parts – was unbearable. Reportedly, those involved were given “puke breaks” so they could dash outside and relieve themselves. 50 years on, this horror has an undeniable rancid power. 
It’s hard to think of a movie with a less edifying premise. In brief: a small group of children are kidnapped in Fascist Italy and abused by Nazis, with scenes including anal rape, suicide, tongue extraction, scalping, eye gouging, genital mutilation, incest, murder, and coprophagia. John Waters (see above) is a big fan. “Salò is a beautiful film,” he has said. “It uses obscenity in an intelligent way… and it’s about the pornography of power.” Tragically, director Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered shortly after the film’s release.
Perhaps one of the most notorious films ever made, Ruggero Deodato’s tale sees a group anthropologists go deep in the Amazon – and get far more than they bargained for. 
Featuring genuine scenes of animal slaughter and mutilation, as well as extremely realistic human corpses being feasted upon, it was subject to an obscenity trial in Italy upon its release. So haunting – and gag-inducing – that Deodato was forced to deny that his film wasn’t simply a documentary. In fact, its verite style when on to influence a whole genre of horror films, including the Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. 
Sometimes, the barely-glimpsed is even more sickening than the explicit. In the most famous scene of Quentin Tarantino’s debut feature, Michael Madsen’s psychopathic Mr Blonde ties a police officer to a chair and slices off his ear (to the strains of upbeat Seventies hit Stuck in the Middle with You). At the crucial moment, the camera swerves away to an empty wall, as if even the director was too sickened to watch. It was too much for the late king of horror Wes Craven, who reportedly ran out of the cinema during this scene.
It wasn’t just the violence and explicit sex scenes which left Irréversible’s viewers squirming, nor the woozy camera-effects, but a clever trick with the film’s soundtrack. The first half-hour of Gaspar Noé’s experimental film is set in a nightclub called Rectm, and uses an inaudible, low frequency throbbing sound to make the audience feel unwell. Just as ultrasound frequencies can cause nausea and dizziness, deep infrasound frequencies can cause panic and anxiety. Although it’s still a point of debate among academics, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence for vomiting caused by infrasound.
Mel Gibson’s bruising account of the Messiah’s last few days worked hard to capture the visceral pain of the crucifixion. At a screening in Wichita, one woman reportedly died of a heart-attack during the film, while others had to be escorted out of the theatre. Awarding the film four stars out of four, Roger Ebert wrote: “This is the most violent film I have ever seen.”
This little-known Australian historical drama follows a group of escaped convicts lost in the Tasmanian outback. Starving to death, they turn on each other and resort to cannibalism. It’s a serious account of true historical events (based on an incident in 1822).
Director Jonathan Auf Der Heide was hoping for a serious reception. Instead, he had audience-members gagging in their seats. “The vomiting thing was a real surprise to me – we had two people vomit in New Zealand, and a couple of people have fainted during the first killing scene,” he told a local paper. “But it’s nowhere near as intense as a lot of the cinema that’s out there… it is approached as authentically as possible.”
Four people fainted during Antichrist’s first screening at Cannes Film Festival in 2009. Telegraph film critic Sukhdev Sandhu labelled the film “torture porn”, while the British media questioned whether it should have been granted an 18 classification without cuts. On February 3, 2014, the film was banned in France following protests by a Catholic group named Promouvoir. 
Lars von Trier’s film depicts the anguished reaction of a couple to the death of their son, who falls from a window while they are having sex. As events escalate, the wife attacks her therapist husband with a block of wood before drilling a hole in his leg. She later removes her own clitoris with a pair of rusty scissors and is finally strangled by her husband who sets fire to her body. It’s not exactly a fun slice of family-friendly viewing. 
Director Luca Guadagnino made millions look at a peach in a whole new way with his Best Picture-nominee Call Me My Your Name, but his next effort, a remake of 1977 horror Suspiria, was considerably more unsettling. Starring Dakota Johnson as Susie Bannion, a dancer who unwittingly gets sucked into the most ill-fated dance company known to man, Suspiria’s level of gore is so mind-bogglingly stomach-churning that Venice Film Festival organisers had a medic on the door of the press screening. 
Lars von Trier (yes, him again) had viewers fleeing the cinema in droves when his latest film premiered at Cannes. Described by Telegraph critic Robbie Collin as “two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn”, the film follows a pretentious serial killer called Jack (Matt Dillon) as he slashes and disembowels strangers on a whim. One scene involves him jeeringly desecrating a child’s dead body. 
Did the director mind the mixed reactions to his movie? Not at all. “That is fine with me,” von Trier said, when asked about the walk-outs. “It is important that a film divides. I am disappointed that it was only 100 people that vomited. I would have liked 200 people to vomit.”
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