10 Films That Creepily Predicted 2016’s Biggest Moments
8. Skeeter (1993) - The Zika Virus Epidemic
The Zika virus was first identified in 1947 in Uganda and until recently was largely contained within equatorial Africa and Asia. While the mosquito transmitted virus doesn’t have too terrible an effect on infected adults, it does have one worrying aspect in that it’s known to cause microcephaly and other such birth defects if spread from an infected pregnant woman to her unborn child.
For us Westerners, viruses like this are fine when confined to Third World countries but god forbid they dare to take hold in the civilised Western world. Unfortunately for the West, viruses know no bounds and the first case of Zika in the USA was reported in early 2016.
On the surface, there aren’t too many similarities between the Zika virus invading the USA and the little known, low budget 1993 horror Skeeter bar the fact they both feature life-threatening mosquitoes at their core. However, if paranoid talk in internet circles is to be believed (it isn’t, but humour us for a moment) there are more similarities between the American Zika outbreak and Skeeter than face value would suggest.
In Skeeter, a small desert town finds itself under attack when a corrupt businessman’s dumping of illegal toxic waste causes mosquitoes to mutate into super-sized, bloodthirsty killers. The mosquitoes that carry the Zika virus might not be as monstrous as the movie’s but the tinfoil hat brigade is already whispering that The Man may be behind the virus spread.
According to the conspiracy theorists before the Zika virus took hold in the Americas, faceless corporations had released genetically modified mosquitoes designed to outbreed Zika-carrying mosquitoes in Brazil, which just so happened to be the epicentre of the outbreak in the Western Hemisphere. Instead of wiping out the virus, however, the conspiracists insist the GM mosquitoes have actually bolstered it.
Pure fantasy and conjecture? Most likely, but perhaps there’s more to Skeeter than just being a B-movie horror that only a handful of people have seen.