Olivia Rodrigo was 'so scared' watching new Joaquin Phoenix film she walked out the theatre

Scary movies can be a fantastic art form, but they are definitely not for everyone.

There's nothing fun about lying awake at night, jumping at every shadow in your room. Suddenly the pile of clothes on the chair morphs into the shape of something awful which has come for you.

Olivia Rodrigo has had such a visceral reaction to a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix that she had to get up and leave the cinema.

I know Napoleon was a terrifying dictatorial figure, but it's extraordinary that the mere hint of his presence still inspires such terror across history.

Wait, sorry, not that Joaquin Phoenix movie.

The movie was actually Beau is Afraid, a surreal psychological tragicomic horror movie which sees Phoenix playing the titular Beau. He is on his way to go and visit his mother, and undergoes a series of increasingly detached and disturbing encounters on the way.

MEGA/GC Images/Getty

Rodrigo said: “I’m a big thriller girl, but I watch a few scary movies here and there. I convince myself that I see sh*t after I come home from watching ‘Insidious’ or something."

We've certainly all been there. There's nothing like a scary movie to make the shadows dance on your bedroom wall. The shape outside that you know is just a tree branch is suddenly an arm grasping to break through the window.

She continued: "Also, I watched that new Ari Aster movie ‘Beau Is Afraid’ and I got so scared. I literally had to walk out of the theater. I have never had such a visceral reaction to a movie in my life. It felt like a bad acid trip.”

Sony Pictures Releasing UK

Beau is Afraid was written and directed by Ari Aster, the mind behind the highly disturbing literal cult movie Midsommer and Hereditary.

The movie saw a very divided response from viewers. In an interview with Empire, Aster said that he hoped people would return to it.

He said: “It’s definitely a film that I think benefits from going back. I don’t think you quite know what it is until you’ve gone all the way through. I imagine that the second viewing would be hopefully rich in a way that the first one can’t.

"It’s designed to be wrestled with. I consider the film to be a picaresque, and I think part of that tradition is a certain irreverence towards the integrity of any sort of narrative structure. The film is designed to kind of shapeshift a lot.”