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The 2011 film ‘Contagion’, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon and Jude Law, has become the most-watched film online with users downloading the movie at an alarming rate.

The film has been analysed and dissected by numerous websites and most of them, if not all, have come to the conclusion that the Academy-Award winning film, has aptly made some predictions about the current corona outbreak.

The movie begins by showing the various ways a virus can spread across the world in a matter of days. Once the virus reaches the United States, all hell breaks loose. The public starts hoarding daily items, triggered by fear and paranoia.In the film, states across the US are quarantined, much like we see Italy and Wuhan being on ‘lockdown’.

The similarities are just too many to list out but one has to watch this Steven Soderbergh film to believe the rather spine-chilling prophecies come true.

South Korea is another country that has witnessed a large number of coronavirus cases. However, some 7 years ago, a South Korean disaster film called ‘Flu’ predicted a similar outbreak in the country.

Written and directed by Kim Sung-su, it is about an outbreak of a deadly strain of H5N1 that kills its victims within 36 hours, throwing the district of Bundang in Seongnam, which has a population of nearly half a million people, into chaos.

Once the outbreak happens, the country witnesses a complete collapse of the system. While disparaging the need for a quarantine, administrators and politicians are confronted with a catastrophic situation as people collapse in the street, including drivers who cause a series of violent crashes. Hospitals and communication systems become overwhelmed, and the quarantine is initiated.

The situation is reminiscent of recent times with governments of various countries failing to control the pandemic.

Four years ago, the film ‘Pandemic’, John Suits directorial, hit the theatres and possibly no one could have thought that a 2016 science fiction thriller would come so close to predicting reality. The Rachel Nichols-starrer shows a post-apocalyptic world where the patients who suffer from viral disease are being searched for in effort to cure them or at worst, euthanise them.

While the movie does not delve into the specifics of how the disease spread, it still manages to paint a rather haunting picture of what the world could come to if the epidemic goes on unchecked.

The 1995 neo-noir science fiction film, ‘12 Monkeys’, is the story about a deadly virus released in 1996 which wipes out almost all of humanity, forcing survivors to live underground. A group known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys is believed to have released the virus.

The Brad Pitt-starrer then goes on to explore the complex turn of events that lead to the release of virus as the protagonist uncovers secrets about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys.

Needless to say, the Terry Gilliam film fans the flames of conspiracies surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak and how the pandemic could have been a bioweapon experiment gone wrong.

The 1971 Robert Wise techno-thriller is the stuff nightmares are made of, simply because the film brings together the two of the scariest themes: virus outbreak and extraterrestrial activities.

The film documents the efforts of scientists investigating the outbreak of a deadly extraterrestrial microorganism in New Mexico. It begins with the story of a team deployed to recover a military satellite which has returned to earth. Aerial surveillance reveals that everyone in Piedmont, New Mexico, the town closest to where the satellite landed, is apparently dead.

What follows next is an intense courtroom drama with Dr. Jeremy Stone, Dr. Mark Hall and Dr. Charles Dutton at the centre of it. Watch the film to see all your coronavirus fears come to life.

The 1995 medical disaster focuses on the outbreak of an Ebola-like virus called ‘Motaba’ in Zaire and then in a small town in the United States. ‘Outbreak’ is different from the other films as it explores the often unheard side of the military and civil agencies, and the desperate measures they often take to control the spread of the virus.

The Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman-starrer and Wolfgang Petersen directorial was a classic case of ‘life imitates art’, because when the film was released, a real-life outbreak of Ebola virus was occurring in Zaire. Sounds scary, doesn’t it?