We might be able to rate future films with a sniff test, study says

Enlarge / The breathing of the crowd: The 2015 found-footage horror film Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension was one of the movies screened during the study. (credit: Paramount Pictures)
Parents of young children often struggle to assess how upsetting a particular film will be for their offspring. Ratings systems can help but tend to be subjective assessments. It might soon be possible to objectively evaluate how intense films might be for younger viewers just by analyzing the chemicals that audiences emit when they breathe, according to a new study by researchers from the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. They described their findings in a new paper in PLoS ONE.
Sure, it seems a bit far-fetched, but tracking the emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is an active and entirely legitimate area of research. Plastics, for instance, emit VOCs as they degrade over time, thanks to exposure to light, heat, moisture, and pollutants. This so-called 'off-gassing' results in a serious issue for museum conservationists and libraries, among others.

Every country has its own rating system for films, designed to guide consumers as to what kinds of content they might encounter while watching a given film. While such systems are supposedly based on objective criteria—how much violence, sexual content, and bad language is included—there is actually quite a bit of subjective variability involved in making these determinations. And the public's sensibilities can shift over time: films that were deemed shocking in the 1930s strike today's audiences as remarkably tame. It matters because a film's rating has a direct impact on how broad an audience it can reach.
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