True scary stories can make the best horror movies.
Not only are real life villains and entities easier for the audience to imagine, the thought
that something like this might happen to them is even scarier.
Classic horror movies also take inspiration from real stories, with everything from real
life criminals to zombies serving as inspiration.
Number 5
An isolated man with an overbearing, religious fanatic for a mother, becomes a twisted monster
after losing his mother to an illness.
In the middle of the night, he digs up his mother’s body.
It’s the start of an obsession.
He digs up the remains of other women, then turns to taking lives himself.
It’s a story most horror fans are somewhat familiar with, and the plot of the 1974 cult
classic Deranged.
There is no shortage of classic horror films inspired by the disturbing life of real-life
monster Ed Gein.
Gein’s gruesome crimes had several twisted factors that have been taken for horror movie
villains.
Whether that’s his adoration for his mother’s corpse inspiring the disturbing reveal in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, or the attempts to make clothing from his victims being replicated
in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs.
While these films were inspired by Gein’s crimes, Deranged’s take on the story is
a lot closer to the true story.
It’s something of a psudo-documentary, with some strange voice over parts and even begins
with a disclaimer saying the names of the people involved have been changed to protect
the identities of the real life individuals.
Deranged tells the story of Ezra Cobbs, a middle-aged man in a small, mid-western community.
His mother is a religious fanatic that isolated him from the rest of the community and, when
she passes away from natural causes, he doesn’t know how to have a normal life.
A year after his mother passes, auditory hallucinations prompted him to dig up her remains.
He continues to act as if she were still alive, and brings her friends in the form of the
bodies of other women.
Some of these are people he dug up but, after an incident in which he takes the life of
a psychic, many of her friends are more recently deceased.
Like in real life, Cobbs tells others about his crimes, but these are brushed off as morbid
jokes due to how open he is.
Like all films, some creative license is taken, but the film takes some of the most unsettling
details of Gein’s real crimes.
In particular, the scenes featuring Cobbs’ final victim, the girlfriend of his friend’s
son, drew ominously close to the terror experienced by Gein’s final victim and the treatment
of her remains after her passing.
It may not have reached the fame of fellow 1974 release Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but
the knowledge that something eerily similar to what was portrayed on scene happened in
real life is truly chilling.
Number 4
In March 1953, a man named Beresford Brown was living in an upstairs flat at 10 Rillington
Place, a house in west London.
The flat below him was empty, the previous tenant having disappeared a few days earlier,
and the landlord allowed Beresford to use the kitchen there.
Beresford decided to put up a shelf, but found the wall he was drilling into was hollow.
Behind the wall was a cupboard, and in the cupboard were the bodies of three women.
Beresford had just uncovered crimes which would go on to inspire the horror film 10
Rillington Place.
The movie from 1971 stared Richard Attenborough as John Christie, a man who took the lives
of at least eight people in the 1940s and 1950s.
Christie was born in 1899 and served in the first world war, where he was hit with mustard
gas.
After the war, he married a woman named Ethel, though it was not a happy marriage and Ethel
soon left him to go back to her family.
Christie spent the 1920s in and out of prison, usually for small crimes like theft but also
for attacking a prostitute.
But after he was released from prison in 1934 he seemed for all the world to have turned
his life around.
Ethel returned to him and the two moved into 10 Rillington Place.
The movie, and much of the general media surrounding Christie, focused on the attack on Beryl Evans,
his third victim.
Beryl lived in the upstairs flat with her husband and baby daughter.
They were not a well off family and, when Beryl fell pregnant again, Beryl looked for
a way out.
By this time, Christie was a respected member of the community.
He had served as a police officer during the Second World War, and had offered a number
of women treatments for various ailments.
When Beryl told friends she was looking for an abortion, which was illegal at the time,
Christie offered a solution.
In November 1949, he took her life.
Beryl’s husband Timothy had tried to tell police someone had taken his wife’s life,
but his version of events was confusing.
At first he seemed to have confessed to the crime and dumped her body down a drain, only
it wasn’t there.
There was no sign of her.
Eventually police did a proper search of the house and found the bodies of Timothy’s
family.
Christie happily testified against him and Timothy was found guilty.
He received capital punishment.
Over the next four years, Christie would take the life of four more women.
His next victim was his wife, who he had grown frustrated with again.
Her body was stored under the floorboards of his home.
There were three more victims in 1953.
Christie was struggling for money, selling his belongings and even attempting to sell
the flat he lived in, even though he didn’t own it.
He eventually disappeared, which was when his crimes were uncovered.
Christie was soon found and sentenced.
He confessed to his crimes, and it was revealed Timothy Evans had been innocent.
It was a major case in abolishing capital punishment in the UK.
10 Rillington Place is a suspense horror film that came out at the time when there was pushback
against the abolishment.
The film makers wanted to depict the true horrors that could be going on behind the
closed doors of a perfectly ordinary terraced house, and the horror Timothy lived through,
losing his life for a crime he did not commit.
Number 3
The classic horror film Scream changed the shape of the genre.
It has since spun out a series of sequels, but screenwriter Kevin Williamson never would
have come up with the idea were it not for a series of gruesome crimes in Florida in
1990.
The Gainesville Ripper, as the criminal has now been dubbed, lit a spark in Williamson’s
mind.
His two teen antagonists in the film wouldn’t take too much from the real life horror villain,
however.
Danny Rolling had already taken the lives of three people when he arrived in Gainesville
just as the autumn term was beginning at the local university.
Rolling had grown up in a bad environment.
He, his mother and his younger brother lived in fear of his father.
When he grew up he tried to join the army but was kicked out after being found in the
possession of illegal substances.
A series of crimes, including armed robberies and violent attacks against women followed,
as did stints in prison.
In November 1989, he took the lives of a family of three, but he wasn’t caught.
Three months later, he fired a weapon at his father and struck him in the head.
His father survived.
Rolling fled to Florida.
In Florida he camped out in the forest just outside Gainesville, waiting for the perfect
time to commit his next crimes.
In late August 1990, he broke into the home of two University of Florida students, taking
both lives before returning to the shadows.
The next day, he took the life of another student and staged her body in a chilling
fashion.
He clearly wanted to invoke horror not only in his victims but in the community as a whole.
He wanted students to be scared they would be next.
There was a small lull, but two days later he struck for a third time, taking the lives
of two more students before disappearing entirely.
As Rolling melted back into the shadows, police believed another student was to blame.
However, they couldn’t find anything linking him to any of the crimes, other than the fact
he had lived in the same building as one of the students.
The case likely would have remained unsolved, if Rolling had been able to resist committing
any more crimes.
Instead, he committed an armed robbery and was captured as he tried to escape.
A DNA sample obtained while he was in prison matched a sample left at the scene of the
crimes.
At first, he claimed he was innocent, then that an alternate personality named Gemini
was responsible.
He was found guilty in March 1994.
Number 2 Many horror movies that are based on true
stories tend to take a real life horrifying tale as a jumping off point.
That is the case with the 1988 film, the Serpent and the Rainbow.
Inspired by the book of the same name, the Serpent and the Rainbow is a zombie film unlike
most others, bringing its focus to the plight of real life zombiefication.
The film was directed by Wes Craven, and tells the story of a Harvard anthropologist who
travels to Haiti to find the substances used to create zombies.
The protagonist is caught up in the political turmoil of the time and the horror becomes
not the undead but the people that create them.
Voodoo doesn’t become a plot device to just explain away the existence of zombies, but
is instead taken seriously.
The question as to whether there really is something supernatural going on is left to
the viewers.
The book the film is based upon comes down with a much clearer answer to that question.
The writer of the Serpent and the Rainbow was Wade Davis.
Wade was a Harvard researcher who went to Haiti to learn more about zombiefication.
A few years before his trip, news stories were printed about a man named Clairvius,
a Haitian villager who came up to his sister 18 years after he had been buried.
Clairvius revealed he had been awake the entire time and, after his funeral, he was dug up
by a Voodoo priest and had spent the last 18 years working on a farm.
It wasn’t the first such story, but given Clairvius had been treated by American doctors
it made headlines.
Wade and his fellow researchers theorised a substance that made it look as if Clairvius
had lost all life signs had been given to him shortly before the doctors declared him
deceased.
After asking around, and at one point getting tricked, Wade was introduced to a man who
could get him what he was looking for.
The man took him on a trip for ingredients, which included the ground up bones of a human
and a pufferfish.
These were all used to create a substance which, when rubbed on someone’s skin, could
induce paralysis.
So far, so similar to the plot of the film, though Wade didn’t face any harassment by
local leaders during his trip.
The high stakes drama and threats against the researcher's soul were created entirely
for the film.
Wade explained in his book how to make it look like someone had passed away, but came
short on how the priests convinced their victims they were really zombies.
In real life, he suggested it was due to cultural beliefs.
In the film, it seems to be something else entirely.
Number 1
It’s not only people with ornithophobia who have been terrified by Alfred Hitchcock’s
1963 classic horror film The Birds.
Most people will cross paths with birds every day and the idea that they might all turn
and attack us for no reason is somewhat terrifying.
Add to that the horror stories from behind the scenes on the set, and it all makes for
one scary film.
There are few people who don’t know what the film is about, and even those who have
never heard of it can probably guess what a Hitchcock film called The Birds would entail.
What starts off as a typical story about a woman trying to get to know a lawyer from
out of town turns into a horror when the birds in a California seaside town begin to attack.
The birds throw themselves at doors and through windows and ceilings.
A seemingly harmless animal becomes deadly in numbers and many of the townspeople have
their life scratched and pecked out of them.
Thankfully, whatever inspired the birds in the film to attack humans doesn’t seem to
be all that common.
Unfortunately, it has happened in real life.
Two years before The Birds was released, the quiet town of North Monterey Bay in California
came under attack from sea birds.
The birds were disorientated and flew into buildings and other objects.
Some were unable to eat, and half digested fish fell on the town.
The town was littered with the bodies of these birds that had gone crazy for no reason.
The crazed birds made headlines in the local area.
Hitchcock happened to be living nearby, and called the local newspaper for more information.
While The Birds was mostly based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the additional
information from the timely attack only made the film that much creepier.
It wasn’t a one off event either.
30 years later, brown pelicans in the area appeared to be affected by the same phenomenon.
Scientists have been able to figure out what exactly caused the terrifying real life scenes.
The birds weren’t specifically targeting people, unlike their on screen counterparts.
An algae in the water had been producing a type of toxin.
The algae was eaten by sea creatures, and the sea creatures the birds.
The concentration of the toxins led the birds to become disorientated, scratch at other
animals, and suffer from seizures.
While it’s good to have an explanation, it’s not clear how much we can do to prevent
something like this from happening again.