10 Horror Movies That Eerily Came True

Andrei Tarkovsky's masterful 1979 sci-fi film Stalker may not be a horror film in the traditional sense, but its aggressively oppressive atmosphere ensures it's absolutely soaked with dread from first minute to last.

The film follows the titular protagonist (Alexander Kaidanovsky) who leads people through the Zone, a location in which the typical laws of physics don't apply, and where a room is alleged to grant the wish of anyone who enters it.

Though Stalker was released seven years before the Chernobyl disaster, it's difficult to watch Tarkovsky's film today without drawing major parallels between the film's Zone and Chernobyl's own irradiated Exclusion Zone.

And while the Exclusion Zone certainly doesn't have any otherworldly physics or a room that can grant your inner-most wish, the very notion of travelling to a desolate, ruinous locale for your own morbid self-interest feels positively ahead of its time.

In the fallout of the Chernobyl disaster the concept of "atomic tourism" was born, where people from all over the world would pay princely sums to be guided through the Exclusion Zone to observe the haunting aftermath first-hand.

Naturally, a deluge of "influencers" have descended upon the site in recent years to get their oh-so-important - and almost impossibly tacky - selfies.

Knowingly, the guides who take tourists through the Exclusion Zone even have a tendency to refer to themselves as "stalkers."