Before there were movies, there were paired daguerreotypes. “THE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENS WITH THE HAT AND CLOAK” was the number one Storypicture-Pair-o-Gram in 1859:
People would see it and just go absolutely insane. Crowds were so big that once they had to put it on display inside a factory, and everybody was pushing and jostling so much that parts of the factory collapsed. Later some of the people came back and burned the factory.
Today we know that most of the Pair-o-Gram riots were tied into anxiety about the looming Civil War. It was harder to work that out while it was actually happening, though, and they continued to be cited as a cause of the Civil War well into 1861.