In what was apparently an egregious mistake in the projection booth, a recent showing of Pixar’s Inside Out at an Ohio theater ended up showing a different film that was well outside the safe, colorful boundaries of kid-friendly fare: Insidious: Chapter 3. It was an involuntary film swap that quite clearly wasn’t well-received by the parents of young children.
Local Ohio paper, Journal-News, caught wind of the incident after an infuriated mother named Jazmyn Moore took to the paper’s Facebook page to vent her frustration about the potentially long-lasting damage done to her horror film-exposed children. According to the woman's post:
I got our money back but the damage is already done … my children are terrified and keep asking questions.
The theater manager quickly provided reparation for the monumental mistake with not only an apology, but refunds and an upgrade to see Inside Out in the costlier 3D format. The measure seems to have mollified the majority of the moviegoers, with the exception of Moore, who continued to cite the impact of her children’s brief exposure to the PG-13-rated Insidious prequel.
According to Moore’s irate account of the incident, the theater’s patrons consisting of parents and juveniles were exposed to what she described as images of children being tied up and murdered, which she said has left her children terrified. However, this qualified claim actually muddles the story a bit, since only a small portion of the beginning of the Insidious series follow-up was said to have played before the mistake was rectified. Moreover, the mother’s description of the horrifying scene also fails to match the events of Insidious 3, which chronicles the possession of a teenage girl from an evil spirit.
Interestingly enough, one Facebook poster who also claimed to be present at the screening in question, implies that the Insidious 3 footage never even got past the innocuous set of opening credits. However, it’s possible that the footage the mother of the allegedly traumatized children describes was not from the Insidious spillover, but rather from the Sinister 2 trailer that likely played before the feature. Seeing as that upcoming film not only shares a similar theme and genre, but has also been hinted to take place in the same continuity, that seems the most plausible explanation. Thus, while the mother’s story could be corroborated, it might be mistaken in the details. Watch that trailer in the video below and decide for yourself.
There is something oddly poetic about a Pixar movie starring the internal psychological components of a young girl’s psyche being replaced with Insidious: Chapter 3, a film that chronicles another young girl’s demonic identity crisis as a malevolent invader looks to take over her own internal psychological components. Of course, potential kismet aside, a boring, more logical explanation for the mix-up is that both films begin with the letters, "Insid."
Oh well. As movie mix-ups go, it could have been worse, like, say, an incident four months back when a Denver showing of The SpongeBob Movie was mistakenly swapped with Fifty Shades of Grey. You can still catch both Pixar’s cleverly original Inside Out and Insidious: Chapter 3 at theaters now… presumably not as part of a double feature.
