It’s hard to admit that some horror movies out there are actually based on real-life events, but the truth is that people do some horrible things sometimes and writers and directors are more than willing to pick up on it and make a story that’s based on it. Sometimes the stories end up being documentaries or as close to the truth as they can possibly get, but there are those moments when directors have to pump the brakes to avoid being sued for likeness rights, especially if the studio didn’t get the rights to the story. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen, but a lot of people are usually ready to tell their story if the right amount is produced, typically enough to make them see dollars signs that exist past the trauma they might have gone through. In many cases, though the story becomes a mirror image or a loosely-based idea of what happened, as the director will take a great many liberties and every opportunity to make their own vision based on the information they’ve gleaned from the horrific crimes that are created at times.
Here are a few movies that are based on real-life events.
5. Ravenous was based on a real story of cannibalism.
There might still be a lot of people that don’t know the story of Ravenous, as it’s based during the Mexican-American War and details the struggle of a second lieutenant that’s been sent to an outpost in the Sierra Nevadas as an exile. When a stranger is taken in he eventually tricks the few soldiers at the base, revealing that he’s a cannibal. Apparently the story goes that a hiker named Alfred Packer lost his friends to another person that was about to eat them. Alfred killed the attacker and then ate both him and his friends. When he was caught with the wallets of his friends and the other hiker he was arrested, and eventually confessed.
4. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was based on Henry Lee Lucas, a noted serial killer.
It’s hard to say how many people Henry really killed, but he was only tried and convicted for 11 and he claimed that he’d killed hundreds. Of course, the problem with that is that for anyone to have killed hundreds of people it would have had to have been through a series of large and very noticeable actions, such as a bombing or something similar that would have affected so many in a short amount of time. Otherwise, the claim that he killed hundreds is easy to debunk since nowhere is it possible to simply kill hundreds of people, even over a span of several years, without the police being able to figure out what was going on.
3. The Amityville Horror was based on the haunting of the Lutz family.
While the real house that was used in the Amityville movies has been lost for the most part since the story has managed to attract several onlookers, the story has been widely conflated as well. The DeFeo’s, the family that was murdered in the home, are the basis behind the hauntings for many people since the idea that Ronnie DeFeo Jr. could go from room to room unloading shell after shell into his family was hard to believe. But when the Lutz’s experienced disturbances in the home it was a big deal since it meant a story could be made of the house and the horror that supposedly lay behind it.
2. Scream was based on the murders committed by Danny Rolling.
Several of his victims were stabbed to death and Danny was brutal enough to remove limbs and pose them after death. Scream was kind of a goofy movie in a lot of senses but the terror that it fed off was inspired by Danny since he killed eight people in his time and was finally caught and executed via lethal injection. One might disagree with the death penalty at times but there are moments when it feels warranted, and even times when it doesn’t feel like enough of a punishment for those that truly deserve such a thing. It might sound cynical and wrong to say, but there are those human beings that don’t really deserve a merciful death.
1. Ed Gein was the basis for several horror movies.
Leatherface and Psycho are two of the most popular horror figures that were inspired by Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield. He was one of the sickest and most demented individuals that have ever crossed the public’s notice, but the characters he inspired somehow seem slightly less scary than the actual individual that they were based around. One has to wonder just how some people can look at other human beings and see amusement in their pain and death, but it has obviously happened.
It kind of makes you look at movies in a different way, doesn’t it?
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