Chernobyl Diaries scared me as a young teenager. A group of tourists go to the city of Pripyat, where the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is located, and tour it. The vehicle that brought them there stops working and the guide with them disappears, leaving them trapped in the abandoned city over night.
The scenes that scared me most came at the end of the movie when, two of the characters that were left in the van were captured by mutants. Other members of the group return to the van at nightfall and see that the two were attacked and that the van is shredded to pieces. As the rest of the group looks to find them, they are chased by a herd of mutants, our “heroes” escape and find one of the previously captured girls (Natalie) but as the rest of the group gets distracted by a young girl Natalie is captured again. The remaining members of the group are forced into underground passages to escape the mutants, another one of the groups is captured. When leaving the underground passage, another is captured by a group of mutants and the rest are forced to leave her behind, while continuing they enter the exposed reactor core #4 and the radiation levels are causing blisters to appear on their skin. Upon leaving that area Natalie’s body is discovered and the two survivors are attacked by mutants but fight through them and are met by the Ukrainian military forces outside the reactor building. One of the survivors is shot by military because he tumbles close to them, leaving only Amanda who falls unconscious and when she wakes up in a hospital they tell her it was only escaped patients, and because she “ knows too much”, she is forced into a dark cell with and swarmed by the recaptured patients.
I was scared of these scenes because the mutant creatures were “just escaped mental patients.” The fact that they tried to blame deaths and complete terror on escaped patients to cover up what is actually going on in Chernobyl is one of the scariest parts to me. There’s so much about Chernobyl that many people don’t know because the government can hide mass amounts of information about it. To sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, we don’t know what could have actually happened during the meltdown, it could have been a way to eliminate some of the population of that area or it could have been reason to poison the area for decades.
