Scary Movie Concepts That Could Totally Happen In Real Life

Movies are supposed to be exciting, escapist, flashy entertainment that whisks us away to another dimension and helps us forget about our problems for a couple of hours. (Well, not documentaries—those exist to bum everybody out and remind the world how awful of a place it is.) Also not doing such a good job of make-believe are a great number of ostensibly fictional narrative films that reflect real life...some of them through terrible scenarios that may be more accurate than we realize. Here are some movies whose stories could someday end up coming true.

Working in space is very delicate, and one false move can lead to death or dstruction, as terrifyingly presented in the Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock drama about an astronaut who miraculously goes from lost in space to safe back home on Earth. NASA's history is riddled with accidents, so the risk of something going wrong is very high. But astronauts are so smart and so incredibly well trained that the possibility of one of them surviving such an event is almost as assured.

The original Red Dawn played on Cold War fears of a sudden invasion of Communist soldiers from the Soviet Union and Cuba—albeit not terribly realistically. The movie's invasion took place in the Midwest rather than a far more likely coastal area or major city, and it was fought off by teenagers. The 2012 recent remake updated the premise for a more current political climate, and had teens fighting off a group of North Koreans. While it's unlikely that a Communist invasion of the U.S. is on the horizon—the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and relations with Cuba have normalized—North Korea remains a threat to the U.S. On the other hand, that country's leaders seem a bit more preoccupied with lobbing missiles from far away instead of sending in foot soldiers.

Armageddon (as well as its summer-of-'98 movie twin, Deep Impact) is about a massive asteroid on a mass-extinction-triggering collision course with Earth. Not only could as asteroid (or a meteor, or some other space rock) hit the planet, but it happens all the time. Somewhere between 37,000 and 78,000 tons of space stuff strikes Earth each year. It's just that it's usually very, very small, or it breaks up into tiny pieces while passing through the Earth's atmopshere. But odds are, at some point, one of those asteroids or meteors is going to be huge. Humans can do a lot of things—we've invented the telephone and frozen yogurt, for example—but one thing we can't very easily do is divert asteroids. That could mean that if a space rock threatens Earth, humanity may have to resort to some crafty solutions—like, say, sending a team of crusty, blue-collar workers onto the asteroid to blow it up.

The threat of a super-virus wiping out all (or at least a major chunk) of humanity is as constant a fear in real life as it is a premise of movies and TV shows. Avian flu, swine flu, SARS, Ebola, and the Zika virus are all recent panics that sent the world scrambling for bug repellent, face masks, and hand sanitizer. The dramatization of an epidemic, such as in Contagion or Outbreak (or The Walking Dead), only makes the real-life threat of rampant disease scarier.

The U.S. is a huge country with many different kinds of people. Some areas are both very religious and socially conservative. The Southern Baptist church is a major force in the southeast, and while church leadership doesn't have an official stance on dancing, it leaves it to each individual congregation to determine for itself whether dancing is allowed at public events. Historically, many Baptist-affiliated churches have banned dancing, as its gyrations can often be construed as highly sexual. In other words, there are towns in the U.S. right now where, if the majority of the population were members of an anti-dance church, the local government could very easily pass legislation to outlaw dancing entirely—just like in Footloose.