10 Horror Movies That Eerily Came True
1. Mediated Reality - Videodrome
Like father, like son, as Brandon Cronenberg probably wouldn't be the astute filmmaker he is without the work of his dad David, whose iconic 1983 body horror classic Videodrome is one of the most brilliantly prophetic films ever made.
The film follows Max Renn (James Woods), the enterprising president of a small TV station specialising in salacious, over-the-top content.
After Max discovers the titular mysterious feed, which shows the plot-devoid torture and murder of random people, he begins broadcasting the show without permission in the pursuit of ratings.
But Max later learns that Videodrome transmits a signal that causes malignant brain tumours in the viewer, some believing that the subsequent body horror hallucinations are a higher form of reality.
While real life hasn't yet reached a point where YouTube videos can make you hallucinate a vagina-like slit in your stomach, Cronenberg nevertheless tapped into something vastly ahead of his time here - the potential for technology to mediate our identities and even our very reality.
Videodrome may be specifically concerned with TV's ability to warp a person's mind and detach them from the world, but it's impossible to watch the film today without considering how accurately it also speaks to social media's impact.
Anyone active on social media creates a schism between their "real" and virtual selves, while at once experiencing the world as filtered through the lens of their own prescribed social media/news feed echo chamber.
In the film, media theorist Brian O'Blivion (Jack Creley) even tellingly says "television is reality," and that, "Soon, all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode-ray tube to resonate."
O'Blivion sees Videodrome as "next phase in the evolution of man as a technological animal," and given how social media is tethered into every aspect of our lives and has effectively re-wired our brains at this point, it's tough not to see Cronenberg's film as predictive far beyond the bounds of mere TV.
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