10 Movies That Tried To Make The Internet Scary

We're all going to die on Y2K! Oh...

By Kenny Hedges /

Any time a new trend or technology comes along, Hollywood tends to go out its way to explore the very worst - however improbable - impact it will have on society. They did it in 1936 with Reefer Madness, they did it in 1956 with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Reds, they did it in Home Alone 2 with Donald Trump, and they're likely to do it again.

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So when the world wide web - the thing you're currently reading this on - first became available to every man, woman and child in North America, California decided it would be the end of days.

Not long before identity theft, child sex rings, serial murderers and whatever plotline that wound up on a Law and Order became a reality.

To an extent, they were right. We were headed straight for it.

However, it also opened the world to a free environment of ideas, thoughts, information, beliefs and music.

Today the world thrives online, but before we understood just what the net was, when it still interrupted your phone line, endlessly informed you of "having mail!" and that awful login sound, here are some films that tried to terrify you of the future.

10. The Net

Attention 90s films: If you're played by Dennis Miller, in all likelihood you're going to die.

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In this particularly ridiculous attempt to makes audiences fear chat rooms and sharing any personal information online, Sandra Bulllock plays a shut-in who works from home, living on a computer that looks like its best feature is the ability to run Oregon Trail.

But she does much more than that, even ordering pizza.

While on vacation, her purse is stolen by a charming stranger (Jeremy Northam) who then sets about stealing her identity. Turns out, Northam is a hitman working for a group of cyberterrorits who plan to...do something with computers.

Likely, they want to crash a lot of them, but it's too complex or boring to get into detail. Bullock succeeds in retrieving her identity and exposing the evil group, but spare a thought for Dennis Miller, whose death is so convoluted it'd make the Jon Benet Ramsey killing look like Robert Chamber's endevers in killing.

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