Uh Oh! A Cinema Accidentally Screened A Bunch Of Horror Trailers Instead Of ‘Peppa Pig’

Life is simple when you’re three years old. Death is something that happens exclusively to goldfish and hamsters, and a tragedy is dropping an ice cream cone.

Thus, having that bubble of innocence popped is a genuinely traumatising event — a moment when all at once, the scope of your world irreversibly widens and you realise that you are a fleshy, mortal vessel, thrust into consciousness and doomed to one day leave it.

There are many bad times for that bubble to pop, but maybe the worst is while you’re settling in with your mummy, your sister, and a small box of popcorn to watch a new Peppa Pig movie. Yet that’s exactly what happened to a bunch of immediately traumatised children in the UK, who, rather than the adventures of a middle-class pig, were instead treated to trailers for the films Brightburn and Ma.

Brightburn is about a young boy with superpowers who turns into the anti-Christ. The trailer features loud musical stings, complicated forms of murder, and a rotating lawnmower blade — none of which appear in Peppa Pig. Ma is about an older woman who goes all Kathy Bates in Misery on a bunch of good-for-nothing kids. The trailer features loud musical stings, liberal use of the word bitch, and complicated forms of murder — which, let me stress again, are not staples of the Peppa Pig universe.

Basically, neither are the kinds of content you would show to anyone under the age of about 12 unless you were willing to pay for 10 years of therapist bills.

The cinema has apologised already, and claims to be investigating how the snafu came about. “As soon as the staff on site were made aware of the situation, the programme was stopped and trailers were taken off screen immediately,” a spokesperson told The Guardian, which is probably of little worth to the families of bawling three-year-old Peppa Pig fans who won’t be able to sleep with the light off until at least their thirties.