Movies That Horrifyingly Killed People In Real Life

The Creeping Unknown (1955)

One of the earliest—and arguably one of the most tragic—instances of a filmgoer passing away during a movie occurred during a showing of the British import The Quatermass Xperiment, which told the story of an astronaut who returns to Earth infected with an alien parasite that threatens to destroy all life on the planet. Released in America in 1956 under the title The Creeping Unknown, the film entered the annals of horror history in November of that year when, according to a story reported in Variety and related in the 1997 book The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films, a nine-year-old boy suffered a ruptured artery and died during a screening in Illinois.