Fan death is the belief that running an electric fan in a closed room with no open windows can kill the people inside. The supposed mechanism is impossible: a fan only moves air around and does not remove oxygen or produce gas. Still, the idea took hold in South Korea in the 1920s and 1930s and stayed strong until the mid-2000s, with a smaller following in Japan. Newspapers sometimes reported it as fact, and as late as 2011 a national paper described a man dying while a fan pointed at him. The myth shows how a plausible-sounding cause can survive for decades without evidence.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.