The movies that predicted an outbreak like coronavirus

(CNN) - Amid fears stoked by the coronavirus, “Contagion” -- a 2011 movie about a pandemic with potentially eerie similarities to recent events -- has been climbing up the iTunes rental charts, reflecting how people often use fiction as a means to process reality. Yet that film is only one example of a recurring theme in movies associated with such an outbreak, a longtime staple of science fiction that has always been informed by science fact.

Not surprisingly, the Hollywood version of global pandemics has frequently spiraled off in fantastic directions, birthing armies of zombies in movies like “The Omega Man,” “World War Z” and “Pandemic.”

More sober stories, however, have tapped into the notion of mankind being threatened with annihilation by a microbial killer. Early examples include the 1971 thriller “The Andromeda Strain”.

The juxtaposition of those impulses within the genre can be seen in two movies released in 1995: “12 Monkeys,” a science-fiction plot about using time travel to try to thwart a nascent plague; and “Outbreak,” a more grounded premise in which an airborne virus gets smuggled into the US from Africa. For all those examples, “Contagion” correlates most directly with the current danger. The movie offers an alarming glimpse at a worst-case scenario. Rumors and panic begin to spread, and the guardrails quickly start to come off society as the days click by, amid quarantines, looting and chilling scenes of vacant airports.