Suspense in the air at the cinemas?

What sort of movie do you like? Do you prefer rom-coms where the feisty heroine is annoyed at first by the egotistical hero but after a journey where their facades are peeled away they find that, despite the antics of his zany roommate, they do in fact love each other? Or perhaps you enjoy the action genre where a disaffected outsider armed only with a nail clipper and a sexy bandana takes on a drug cartel with access to a military arsenal equivalent to that of a small Central American republic? Alternately, you may enjoy the classic whodunit where an inspector with a sackably-stupid offsider tries to determine which of 17 people with plausible motives and opportunities murdered the local mayor with a dark past? Whatever genre you gravitate towards, it is clear that the types of movie available are quite different and now a new study has shown that difference even extends to the air that is in the movie theatre.

What we do know is that the air fingerprint is very different from a comedy to a thriller and researchers could tell you what type of movie was being watched by air analysis.

For the new study researchers measured air composition in movie theatres using the inlet of a mass spectrometer inserted into the ventilation system. Measurements were taken every ten seconds and this allowed them to get a clear chemical signal of the air present for each movie.

The audiences in the study watched movies from different genres such as comedies like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “Buddy” or fantasies like “The Hobbit” or a sci-fi thriller like “The Hunger Games”. In all 16 films were part of the study.

The air analysis showed that when there was great suspense, when the heroine was fighting for her life, the levels of carbon dioxide and isoprene levels in the air increase significantly. Isoprene and carbon dioxide are both exhaled to some degree all the time and we don’t know what mechanism makes them skyrocket when suspense is in the air. What we do know is that the air fingerprint is very different from a comedy to a thriller and researchers could tell you what type of movie was being watched by air analysis.

Who knows, maybe we’ll soon be saying, “Wow, that movie was a real isoprene injector!” Or maybe not?