There are times when we don’t know what’s going on with the French, particularly their obsession with Jerry Lewis, and here’s another example that leaves us scratching our heads at our baguette loving brethren. The horror hit "Annabelle" has been pulled from some French theaters because people arrived and straight up rioted. Seriously. Well, the youths did anyway.
The story goes that in Marseille, Strasbourg, and Montpellier, abnormally huge crowds (1000 people for a 450-seat cinema, for example) of under-16s showed up at theaters for "Annabelle" and sort of tore the place apart. “Some didn’t have the most elementary notion of how to behave,” theater owner Didier Tarizzo told The Times. “They were throwing popcorn and talking at the top of their voices or walking round. It’s not up to me to teach young people how to respect the law. What worried me was that a cinemagoer irritated by all the noise could have had a go at an adolescent.”
Granted, popcorn throwing and loud talking are not that foreign to your average night at the multiplex, but we suppose multiplied by hundreds it becomes a problem.
French film critic Alain Grasset posits that teenagers—like caged animals suddenly unleashed—see going to the movies as "pretext to go a little wild." Uh, maybe? We don’t know, but this seems to be a phenomenon of sorts. Apparently, this type of behavior has happened before during screenings of "Paranormal Activity" and "Sinister." So seriously, what’s going on in France?
We’d like to think that French teens were staging a protest against Hollywood continuing churn out one mindless, cheap horror sequel/spinoff after another, but that’s probably not the case. But if someone wants to make a horror movie about going to a horror movie, well, your source material is right here. [The Guardian]