People have been copying what they see on the big screen since the beginning of cinema,
but when a criminal brings a horror movie to life, it makes the world just a little
scarier.
The following are horror movie scenarios that became a disturbing reality.
1994's Interview with the Vampire rejuvenated the market for tales of bloodsuckers.
It tells the story of Louis, a man from 1790s Louisiana who becomes a vampire, and how his
undead life progresses for the next couple hundred years.
On the night after viewing the film, a man named Daniel Sterling was said to have told
his girlfriend Lisa Stellwagen that he wanted to kill her and drink her blood.
He then stabbed her repeatedly and in fact did drink some of her blood.
His defense team would go on to claim that the film had, quote, "mesmerized" him.
They tried to claim insanity by saying that Sterling had lost his mental faculties after
viewing the film and that he thought he was a vampire.
Stellwagen survived, and she was able to testify against Sterling.
It turned out that he had been abusive and violent well before the movie, and he was
angry that she went out with another man and may have been planning to leave him.
The prosecution argued that the reason Sterling drank Stellwagen's blood was most likely so
that he could claim insanity when he was inevitably caught.
In the end, the jury wasn't convinced by Sterling and found him guilty of attempting to kill
Stellwagen.
In the world of The Purge franchise, a malicious government regime takes over the United States
and then devises a scheme to rid the country of undesirables: a once-a-year holiday, dubbed
"Purge Night," when, for 12 hours, all crime, including murder, is legal and even encouraged.
The government claims that this annual venting of aggression is necessary for the country
to function, and it accordingly becomes a big deal that people look forward to.
The films hit the zeitgeist hard enough such that the concept of Purge Night took hold
in America's consciousness as a critique on class inequality and race relations, among
other subjects.
Inspired by the concept of the movies, an Indianapolis man named Jonathan Cruz, who
was already a career criminal, committed a spree of crimes over several nights in 2016.
Between May 12 and 15, he committed three killings, several robberies, an attempted
kidnapping, and more.
During that time, he sent text messages to friends and told victims that his actions
were inspired by the movies.
One message he sent read,
"I purge every night now."
Cruz even recorded himself committing several of his crimes, and he seems to have struck
completely at random.
He was eventually caught and received a life sentence without parole.
"In our seven years, we've never seen anything like this.
I mean, just the thought that someone would take three innocent lives for sport is just
beyond our comprehension."
1973's The Exorcist tells the story of a young girl possessed by a demon and her mother's
attempts to save her from the evil inside her.
The novel that the film was based on purported to be inspired by a true story of an exorcism
that the Catholic Church performed in the 1940s.
In 1980, a woman named Patricia Ann Frazier watched the film and 10 days later, she killed
her 4-year-old daughter and even cut out her heart.
She claimed that the child had become possessed by demons, and watching the movie had given
her this idea.
After more than a year of drawn-out legal wrangling, Frazier was eventually found not
guilty by reason of insanity.
Not everyone was convinced by this, though.
The prosecution maintained that Frazier had a history of abusing her child and that she
was a completely sane, cold-blooded killer.
They also claimed that Frazier killed her daughter because she wanted to find a new
boyfriend.
After her acquittal, Frazier was turned over to the custody of her mother.
After the success of Interview with the Vampire, author Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles book
series became a hot commodity.
After several failed attempts to launch an adaptation of the sequel novel, The Vampire
Lestat, Warner Bros. decided to combine the second and third books into a single movie:
Queen of the Damned, released in 2002.
While it wasn't very successful with critics or audiences, it is notable as the second
and final feature film appearance of R&B singer Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash a few months
before the movie's release.
Less than a year after the Queen of the Damned came out, a Scottish man named Allan Menzies
became obsessed with the movie and claimed to have watched it over 100 times.
He was especially taken with Aaliyah's vampire queen character Akasha [uh-KAHSH-uh], who
he said visited him numerous times.
When Menzies' neighbor Thomas McKendrick stopped by and in the course of conversation criticized
Menzies' obsession with Akasha, Menzies said that she appeared and ordered him to kill
McKendrick and drink his blood in order to become a vampire.
He stabbed McKendrick to death, drank his blood, and ate part of his head, then disposed
of the body in the woods.
Menzies was found sane at trial and sentenced to life in prison.
"Allan did many things for people to question his sanity.
He wrote letters home to his family and he would sign them 'Vamp.'"
In the Scream franchise, teens are terrorized by various killers in black robes and a white
mask.
The killer has been known as Ghostface, no matter who was behind the mask.
The film and its sequels reignited the slasher genre and inspired countless knock-offs.
In the universe of Scream, one reason the killers are dressed the same way is because
the costume is cheap and easy to find.
This turned out to also be the case in real life, as the films inspired several copycat
crimes across the world where people killed others while dressed in the iconic mask and
robes.
Perhaps the most disturbing one happened in Belgium in 2001.
15-year-old Alisson Cambier visited her 24-year-old neighbor Thierry Jaradin to return some movies
that she had borrowed from him.
Jaradin made romantic advances toward Cambier, which she rejected.
He then excused himself to another room, came back wearing a Ghostface costume, brutally
stabbed her to death, and posed her corpse on his bed.
He claimed that the killing was premeditated and that the movies had inspired him.
He was sentenced to life in prison.
Oliver Stone's 1994 movie Natural Born Killers stars Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis as
two young criminals who go on a road trip across the United States, causing mayhem and
becoming a media sensation along the way.
It was heavily criticized at the time of its release due to its violence, but it's attained
cult status in the years since.
In March 1995, Sarah Edmondson and Benjamin Darras, a couple from Oklahoma, were taking
drugs and watching Natural Born Killers over and over when they decided they wanted to
commit their own crime spree.
They drove to Mississippi when, short on money, they decided to commit their first killing.
Darras shot a man named William Savage to death in the office of his business and robbed
him for just $100.
The next day, in Louisiana, Edmondson shot a convenience store clerk in the neck during
a robbery, severing her spinal cord and rendering her quadriplegic.
Edmondson and Darras then returned to Oklahoma, where they were caught and sentenced to prison,
Darras for life and Edmondson for 35 years.
They admitted that the film inspired their crimes, and the family of Byers even filed
suit against director Oliver Stone and Warner Bros., though the case was thrown out.
The long-running Saw series features gruesome traps, a creepy puppet, and eerie videos in
which the Jigsaw killer explains his motives.
In 2007, two 13-year-old Tennessee girls were attempting to imitate the Jigsaw killer's
threatening recordings when they randomly prank called a woman named Beverly Dickson
and left her a voicemail.
The girls used many of the same lines from the films in the message, in which they informed
Dickson that one of her friends was trapped in her house and toxic gas would be released
if she didn't free the friend in 10 minutes.
While this might sound like a corny prank that wouldn't fool many people, it nevertheless
resulted in tragedy.
Dickson didn't listen to the message until the following day while she was at a funeral.
Hearing the threat along with the stress of the funeral caused her to panic and have a
stroke.
She was rushed to the hospital, but she didn't survive.
The girls were charged with phone harassment.
The Friday the 13th films feature hockey mask-wearing, machete-wielding Jason Vorhees as he sets
out to punish anyone who dares come near Camp Crystal Lake, where he drowned after being
left unattended by camp counselors.
In 1988, at the height of the series' popularity, Massachusetts teen Mark Branch became obsessed
with Jason, even allegedly coming to idolize and identify as the character.
On October 24 of that year, a woman named Cheryl Gregory found her twin sister Sharon
brutally killed.
Police quickly suspected Branch.
Although the exact reason why they suspected him was never made public, it's rumored that
they found a pair of boots and a hockey mask, the same kinds worn by Jason, at the crime
scene along with similar ones at Branch's home.
Since the killing happened a week before Halloween and Branch remained at large, a local Halloween
parade was cancelled and trick-or-treating was rescheduled for daylight hours.
Once deer hunting season started a month later, Branch's body was found hanging in the woods.
Some internet sleuths have posited that Branch could've been lynched by angry locals who
found him, or even that he'd been framed and was killed to cover it up, but the official
police ruling was that he killed himself.
The 1965 film The Collector features a man kidnapping a woman and locking her in the
basement of his secluded farmhouse.
It served as an inspiration for a couple of real life killers about twenty years later.
On June 2nd, 1985, Charles Ng was caught shoplifting a vise from a hardware store in San Francisco.
A friend of his arrived and offered to pay for the stolen goods, but it was too late.
Police had already arrived.
When they checked the second man's ID, they discovered that it was actually someone else's,
so they arrested both men.
This ended up being the downfall of two of the deadliest serial killers of the 80s.
The friend, Leonard Lake, killed himself by swallowing cyanide pills that he smuggled
into jail.
Ng, however, escaped and fled to Canada.
Lake and Ng had been partners for what they called "Project Miranda," in which they kidnapped
and killed people at Lake's secluded cabin.
By the time they were caught, they were believed to have killed 25 people.
Ng was eventually extradited from Canada and put on trial.
He was sentenced to death in 1999 and was still on death row as of a 2019 record of
condemned inmates.
"If anyone deserves the death penalty, I would think he does."
In the 1991 film Warlock, the title magical character is about to be put to death in 1690s
America, but he's instead sent forward to the 1990s by Satan himself.
He's tasked with finding a book that has the power to end the world.
He's then pursued by a man from his own time who also went through Satan's time portal,
as well as a woman from the 1990s.
14-year-old Sandy Charles was a fan of the movie and reportedly became obsessed with
it.
In particular, he was interested in a scene in which the Warlock kills an unbaptized child
and then boils the dead child's fat to create a flying potion.
Charles became so enamored with the idea that he recruited an 8-year-old boy, and they together
planned to kill a 7-year-old child to attempt to make the Warlock's flying potion.
Charles and his young accomplice beat, mutilated, and cooked parts of their victim.
Due to their ages, Charles was tried as an adult for the crime while his accomplice wasn't
charged at all.
Charles was found not guilty by reason of insanity and has been in psychiatric care
ever since.
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