By Joll Rosen
The Virginian-Pilot
BALTIMORE — Shaking, sweating and swooning are par for the course among the passionate young fans of the “Twilight” series. But reports that a scene in “Breaking Dawn” has been sparking seizures in theaters nationwide has epilepsy experts on the alert.
Officials at the Epilepsy Foundation issued a warning last week to its nearly 11,000 followers on Facebook, saying people prone to certain types of seizures might want to skip the film.
“If you were parents of a child with epilepsy, you would not send your child to the movie,” says Mimi Carter, the foundation’s director of communications. “Why would you risk it?”
There have been at least nine reported instances of people having seizures during “Breaking Dawn,” the latest installment in the vampire series. The trigger seems to be an intense birth scene that involves a strobe effect with flashes of red, white and black light.
In one instance, a California man at the theater with his girlfriend began to convulse during the graphic scene.
According to CBS Sacramento, paramedics rushed Brandon Gephart to the emergency room after he was “convulsing, snorting, trying to breathe.” Gephart remembered nothing of the attack, but his girlfriend, Kelly Bauman, said, “He scared me big time.”
In another instance, a woman who took her daughters to see the movie in Oregon starting feeling “strange” during the scene.
Tina Goss told television station KATU in Portland that she started feeling sick to her stomach. Goss said she wasn’t coherent again until arriving at a hospital.
“My hands were completely blue for like two to three hours,” she said. “The next day, I was so lethargic I felt like I’d, you know, like ran eight marathons.”
Other instances have been reported in Maine, Utah, Massachusetts and Canada.
Many more people say they have gotten sick during the movie - for reasons that have nothing to do with epilepsy. On Twitter, for instance, dozens of teens say they got queasy and even vomited or fainted during the movie’s grislier interludes.
A retired physician in California, Zach Pine, began documenting cases on a website after his 18-year-old son, who had never had a seizure, had one during the movie.
People susceptible to this sort of attack suffer from what’s known as photosensitivity, a stimulus-induced seizure disorder.
While epilepsy is relatively uncommon in the population - about 3 million Americans have it - photosensitivity is even rarer, occurring in just 3 percent of those with epilepsy.
A seizure trigger for a photosensitive person can be any number of things - strobe flashes as in the movie, driving past a repetitive pattern like a picket fence, watching sunlight flicker through some trees. And the seizure itself could be quite noticeable, with convulsions, or undetectable, with a person simply staring or seeming unresponsive.
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