A boy collapse after watching new sci-fi film, Prometheus, which was given a moderate rating. Questions are now surfacing whether there is a need to raise the rating.

The 15-year-old was watching the film at Jindabyne, in New South Wales, when he passed out during the scene and began having a seizure. He was taken to Cooma District Hospital where he was in a stable condition.

The Ridley Scott feature is a prequel to the 1979 Alien that was a box office hit. Noomi Rapace's character, Elizabeth, performs a gruesome emergency caesarean section on herself to remove an alien.

Because of this and other scenes, the film received an R rating in the US that restricts audience under 17 years old to watch the film without a guardian. In Australia, it was given an M rating.

The Australian Classification Board originally classified Prometheus as MA15+, which means that those who are under 15 years old needed to be accompanied by a guardian. However, because of the appeal of Fox, the distributor of the film, the rating was dropped so that younger audience can watch it.

Sydney-based filmmaker, Joseph Sims, who has seen Prometheus twice, said similar reports of moviegoers suffering seizures occurred when Pulp Fiction first came out in 1994.

In Pulp Fiction, there was a scene where John Travolta delivers the adrenalin shot to Uma Thurman's heart where a lot of people with weak hearts and stomach passed out.

"There's a famous story where Quentin Tarantino was at a New York theatre presenting the film and someone had a seizure during that scene," Sims said.

According to Sims, the scene is not really gory. However, the idea and concept of an alien squirming inside you and performing your own surgery is "quite horrible."

The film's distributor has not yet commented on the incident.

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