Spoiler Alert! Have you ever been hypnotized in a movie theater? Is group hypnotism possible?

Well I went to the midnight opening of Transformers 3 with my son. Didn’t know it was 3D. The movie is highly visual, to say the least.

Half way through, on a certain scene, I began to feel weird. I felt like the world didn’t exist any longer, and I was floating through space and time. It was uncomfortable and I had to turn away. It took a moment to come back to reality, because the soundtrack kept me phased out for a second. I took my glasses off and looked down at my feet, and a minute later I was alright again.

But before I rejoined the movie, I decided to look around the theater at other people. That was the most eerie feeling I’ve had in a very long time. The theater was jam packed, and everyone was staring at the screen with their mouths wide open in awe and amazement, as if the entire crowd had been seduced by an enormous cobra, put into a state of glossolalia, before being devoured by a giant monster. Super creepy.

At times, my mind goes places that I don’t understand completely. I couldn’t help but draw analogies to hoards of unsuspecting people being group hypnotized to worship a false god. I know I’m making a bigger deal out of it than necessary, but I can’t help it. It frightened me. Not the movie, but the idea that such a large crowd could be taken so far afield from their real lives and dive so deeply into a fantasy like that. Someone could have shouted “fire”, and I have no doubt it would not have been heard by anyone. It showed me how easily it was for humans to be diverted, bent, twisted, just by shining a pretty light in their eyes.

Not much about the movie stuck with me. But the unsettling experience of being in the midst of a few hundred zombies will be with me for a very long time.

Is it possible that everyone in that room was being hypnotized without realizing it? Is there any similarity between that and the type of control a cult leader or politician or religious movement can take over people?