Prophecy

A public health doctor investigates a dispute between a paper mill and the local Native American community and finds the river is poisoning everything, including a bear that is now enormous and wrong.

John Frankenheimer, who made The Manchurian Candidate, directed it as a straight-faced environmental horror film, and the seriousness is part of the appeal: the mercury politics are real and detailed, and then there is a skinned monster bear tearing through a campsite.

The sleeping-bag sequence, in which a child in a bag is swatted against a rock and explodes in feathers, is the most famous thing in it and is startling.

It flopped and was mocked, and the ecological argument it makes about industrial mercury poisoning is entirely accurate and was based on the real Minamata disaster.