Kids ready to watch 'Peter Rabbit' were accidentally shown a terrifying horror movie trailer

An audience of Australian children sitting down ready to watch Peter Rabbit were instead treated to the trailer for Hereditary, a movie critics have called “this generation’s The Exorcist”.

Event Cinemas in Innaloo, a suburb of Perth, had about 40 children in the audience when the blunder happened. Instead of, as they expected, being shown something that looked like this:

They were shown something that looked like this:

Oh, no. That is a man aflame. He is entirely on fire.

“It was dreadful,” an audience member told WA Today. “Very quickly you could tell this was not a kid’s film. Parents were yelling at the projectionist to stop, covering their kids’ eyes and ears. A few went out to get a staff member but she was overwhelmed and didn’t really know what to do. Some parents fled the cinema with their kids in tow.”

In a way, they were lucky - Hereditary is said to be one of the best horror films in years. here’s the trailer, which admittedly even as an adult is pretty horrifying:

Yeeeeeeeah, you can see how kids might be sliiiiiiiightly freaked out by that. In the projectionist’s defence, though, it does feature the name “Peter” shouted a few times. 

Starring Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne and the lady that plays Aunt Lydia in A Handmaid’s Tale, Hereditary opens over here on June 15th. Take your kids!

(Pics: Columbia Pictures/A24)