After a train derailment in the village of East Palestine, residents are living out the plot of a movie in which they acted as extras less than a year ago.
In the Netflix movie White Noise, released in November 2022, a train carrying toxic chemicals suffers an accident and derails, releasing fumes that create a toxic cloud covering an entire town in Ohio.
This chemical spill requires everyone nearby to evacuate the area and seek shelter away from the accident.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because a real case occurred last weekend with chilling similarities to those depicted in the movie.
Last February 4, a freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, carrying several chemicals, including highly toxic and dangerous vinyl chloride.
The accident caused a large fire.
Officials feared that the chemicals could cause an explosion, so they decided to conduct a controlled burn that released phosgene, leading the more than 4,700 residents of the affected town to evacuate the area.
The film is based on a 1985 book of the same name, where a similar event occurs, but the novel never identifies the location.
The Netflix feature film coincides with the tragic crash and spill and places the conflict in a town in Ohio, the same area where East Palestine is.
But the coincidences do not end there.
The location used to shoot the film was the same town of East Palestine, and the screenwriters, producers, and virtually all the extras were natives of East Palestine.
One resident, Ben Ratner, spoke with CNN this week and recounted that he had the crazy experience of not only having to evacuate his own home after the February 4 incident but also having to act out leaving his own home as an extra in White Noise just 9 months earlier.
Ratner appeared in a scene in which the family of characters played by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig is caught in a traffic jam with hundreds of people as they try to evacuate their town after a train full of toxic chemicals derails and releases a toxic cloud.
“The first half of the movie is almost exactly what’s happening here,” Ratner told CNN, adding that the parallels between real life and the film are “unbelievable” and “chilling.”
“Everyone’s been talking about it here,” Ratner said of his friends and neighbors who also acted in the film, emulating the same crisis they now experienced firsthand.
“I actually made a meme where I superimposed my face on the poster and sent it to my friends,” and concluded, “I never thought the same thing would happen to me that I got paid to act less than a year ago.”
With information from Derecha Diario