Horror Movies Based on a True Story

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Insidious director James Wan’s The Conjuring, in which Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga play, respectively, real-life ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren. Indeed, horror has a long history of using real incidents to inspire real scares.





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Ten films have been inspired by the 1977 book The Amityville Horror which allegedly detailed the experiences of George and Kathy Lutz, a young couple who moved out of their home at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, just 28 days after they moved in due to what they said were paranormal incidents. Margot Kidder and James Brolin play the Lutzes in the original 1979 film which sees them terrorized by unexplainable incidents, including black ooze bubbling up in the house and George constantly waking up at 3:15am. Eventually the Lutzes find out their home was built on an Indian burial ground.





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First-time writer-director Greg McLean’s disturbing horror movie Wolf Creek was inspired by a number of real murders in Australia. The film casts John Jarratt as Mick Taylor, a seemingly-friendly bushman who offers to help a trio of young travellers when their car leaves them stranded. What they don’t know is that Taylor was the one who disabled their car and intends to torture and murder them one by one. Several incidents of young people disappearing have been cited as an influence on McLean, including Ivan Milat, a serial killer who plied his murderous trade in New South Wales in the 1990s.





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The story of killer Ed Gein has inspired generations of filmmakers. The Wisconsin handyman’s crimes included creating a “woman suit” from the skins of corpses he had dug up, inspiring several films, including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Deranged, and Silence of the Lambs. But the first director to depict Gein’s depravity, albeit in a roundabout way, was Alfred Hitchcock. He hired young screenwriter Joseph Stefano to adapt Robert Bloch’s book Psycho, about Norman Bates, a psychotic young man with mother issues. Rising star Anthony Bates was cast as Bates and found it tough to find work afterwards as he was so thoroughly identified with that one role.





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Whether or not a Mothman really was haunting the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia between November 1966 and December 1967, something strange was going on. Writer John Keel documented the events in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies. Writer Richard Hatem subsequently adapted the book into a screenplay ultimately directed by Mark Pellington. Richard Gere was cast as John Klein, a newspaper columnist mysteriously drawn to Point Pleasant whose residents have reported seeing a moth-like figure about town. Klein becomes obsessed by the Mothman, and fears that a prophecy of death relayed to him by a being he thinks to be supernatural may be coming true.





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It was a tragic story. American tourists Tom and Eileen Lonergan disappeared at sea in January 1998 off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef when they were mistakenly left behind by the group with whom they had been scuba diving. A search was initiated two days later, after their possessions were found onboard the boat, but there was no sign of them. That story inspired Open Water, a low-budget horror film that cast Daniel Travis and Blanchard Ryan as Daniel and Susan, a young couple surrounded by sharks when, similarly, they are accidentally abandoned by their scuba diving group after the passenger headcount goes wrong.





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Rightly considered one of the scariest movies ever by Martin Scorsese, director Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity stars Barbara Hershey as Carla Moran, a single mother raped and tormented by an unseen demon. Not surprisingly her therapist (Ron Silver) does not believe her, but Carla seeks out scientific validation for the attacks. The events of the film were based on those allegedly experienced in the early ‘70s by Doris Bither, a woman living in Culver City, California, whose case is one of the most infamous in the world of paranormal investigation. Oddly enough, Furie himself does not consider The Entity to be a horror film.





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It seems like The Exorcist will forever be the most famous demonic possession film ever made, and it gets much of its power from how real it seems. That is not surprising given that it was inspired by a case of possession in 1949. The Exorcism of Emily Rose is similarly based on a real incident, that of Anneliese Michel, a young German Catholic who died in 1976 after multiple exorcism. Her parents and priest were charged with her death which was ruled to have been caused by dehydration and malnutrition. The film is similar, casting Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter in the title role.





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They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and that was certainly the case with Stewart and Cyril Marcus, twin brother gynaecologists who died in their New York apartment in 1975 at age 45 from barbiturate withdrawal. That story inspired David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, the disturbing (natch) tale of Elliot and Beverly Mantle, twin gynecologists whose lives fall apart when they begin treating – and sleeping with – Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold), an actress having trouble conceiving. Cronenberg’s script was also based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland.





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Truth is also often crueller than fiction. The notorious case of the abuse and death in 1965 of teenager Sylvia Likens by her foster mother Gertrude Baniszewski has inspired many works of fiction and non-fiction. Perhaps most effecting of them all was The Girl Next Door. Based on the novel of the same name by Jack Ketchum, Girl casts Blythe Auffarth as Meg, a teen sent to live with her sadistic aunt Ruth (Blanche Baker). Ruth dislikes Meg from the start, and the taunting and abuse heaped on her by Ruth and her sons eventually escalates to rape, torture, and murder.