6 movies and shows that have made us sick, literally

The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Blair Witch (2016)

Full disclosure: I never really understood the hype about the original Blair Witch Project when it came out back in ’99. It just didn’t seem that scary to me. The hand-held shaky camerawork, on the other hand, was something new and different at the time. It was also super vomit-inducing for a lot of people. The found-footage format was ground-breaking in its style and its ability to get moviegoers sick. The quick turns. The shaky first-person perspective. The night-vision blurryness. It makes sense.

The wobbliness was so bad, a lot of theaters issued warnings beforehand. And at least one chain of theaters in Seattle gave guests passes to come in and out if the motion sickness got too bad, and provided water to help calm them (and their tummies) down.

Last year, when Lionsgate jumped on the reboot bandwagon and first released its trailer to the follow up flick Blair Witch, some viewers’ equilibriums still couldn’t handle the shaky style, though it seems audiences had toughened up a little by then. Though this time around, the producers skipped the part where the footage the audience sees was mostly shot by the actors in the scenes. Instead they just focused on keeping the found-footage format feeling “authentic.” And in this case, authentic still makes me a little dizzy.