The human tendency to see patterns in a noisy sea of stimuli is called apophenia. Once, probably, this was important to our survival. To make the connection between a shift in the wind, a darkening sky, and the likelihood of coming rain; to discern the evenly spaced tracks of a rabbit or bobcat in freshly fallen snow; to be lost in the dark, only to gaze up at the stars and discover a map that will lead you home.

Today, instead of alerting us to a rhythmic rustling in the underbrush that could be just the wind but could also be a knife-wielding member of an enemy tribe, apophenia is mainly a means of telling ourselves stories—imposing narratives, theorizing conspiracies, chalking up to destiny or devilry what some would see as random happenstance. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both shot in the head, in the presence of their wives, by assassins with 15-letter names? Did you know that if you start playing Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon at just the right moment during the opening credits of The Wizard of Oz, an eerie synchronicity emerges? Did you know that The Simpsons predicted 9/11?

To search the art of the past for harbingers of the present is a precarious enterprise; it’s all too easy to see something prescient, sinister, or supernatural in the imaginings of a previous decade. It is more precarious still to do this in search of narratives that not only predict the future but confirm our biases, political or otherwise, proving we were not just right but on the right side of history all along. We know this. We do it anyway.

Which brings me to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a contemporary Western-cum-noir about a beautiful vampire whose hunting ground is an Iranian ghost town called Bad City. I saw it at the time of its release in 2014 and found it visually stunning but narratively unexceptional. But amid the ongoing unrest and violence in Iran, and in the wake of a U.S. military campaign that left the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dead—and his 36-year regime hanging onto its authority by a thread—I had a sense that it might make for an interesting rewatch. What I didn’t expect was a number of moments so bizarrely prophetic that they made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end...