10 Horror Movies That Eerily Came True

It's often suggested that horror movies are so insanely popular because they allow audiences to ponder their own immovable immortality in the comfort and safety of the cinematic experience.

Not all horror movies are supernatural, of course, but more often than not the horror doesn't represent a direct threat to us, and so it's easier to enjoy the terrifying acts on screen as escapist thrill-ride entertainment than something genuinely, well, horrific.

There are exceptions, though, where a horror film gets a little too real - so real, in fact, that even the filmmakers may not have expected how eerily it would parallel real life.

These 10 films, from card-carrying horror to more subtle, low-key riffs on the genre, all came to fruition in ways nobody could've ever really anticipated, whether mirroring current social ills, foreshadowing the advancement of insidious technology, or being straight-up imitated by an awful real-life event.

In some cases the filmmakers clearly had an inspired inkling of where the future was headed, while in others life imitating art was nothing more than a mere coincidence. Either way, it blankets an added layer of creepy on top of these already-unnerving and unsettling horror films...

Back when the COVID-19 pandemic started, many found themselves comparing the situation to Steven Soderbergh's 2011 pandemic thriller Contagion.

Viewers were taken aback by the behavioural similarities of the masses in both the film and reality almost a decade later, and also the film's use of terms like "social distancing," which of course didn't enter the global lexicon until 2020.

But most of this information was readily available prior to Contagion's release if you did your research, and the film's virus is decidedly more deadly than COVID-19 with a mortality rate of 25-30%.

Yet what Soderbergh's film captures most frighteningly is the culture of misinformation. While back in 2011 the subplot involving Jude Law's conspiracy theorist Alan Krumwiede seemed goofy and implausible, it hits totally differently today.

Krumwiede spends the film spreading inaccurate information about the virus and shilling a snake oil cure derived from the plant forsythia.

Given that there have been literally dozens of fake Coronavirus cures sold online throughout the pandemic, by people stirring up fear and uncertainty in actual science, Contagion has become an intimately prescient film in ways few could've ever anticipated.

In a recent interview, Law himself commended Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns on how incredibly they foresaw the conspiracy theorist deluge:

"Scott and Steven had done a huge amount of research and really sent me all sorts of links to different characters online who were gathering and building followings of their rants and predictions... What's extraordinary, maybe more in a way than the virus spreading, is how characters like that have really started to pop up."