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Open Water (2003)
When a couple goes scuba diving in Open Water, their boat accidentally leaves them behind in shark-infested water. It’s based on something that really happened to American tourists Tom and Eileen Lonergan, who were left behind by a diving company off the Great Barrier Reef. By the time the mistake was realized two days later, it was too late, and they were never seen again. A shark attack seems not to have been the cause of death, however, as the couple’s dive jackets were eventually found. The jackets weren’t damaged, which suggested that the Lonergans likely took them off, “delirious from dehydration,” and drowned.
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Borderland (2007)
When three friends head to a Mexican border town to have some fun in this movie, they get mixed up with a cult specializing in human sacrifice. The concept loosely stems from the life of Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a drug lord and cult leader who was responsible for the death of American student Mark Kilroy.
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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
The iconic baddie Freddy Krueger kills teenagers via their dreams in Wes Craven’s franchise-launching film. Craven told Vulture that the idea stemmed from an article he read in The Los Angeles Times about a family of Cambodian refugees with a young son who reported awful nightmares. “He told his parents he was afraid that if he slept, the thing chasing him would get him, so he tried to stay awake for days at a time,” said Craven. “When he finally fell asleep, his parents thought this crisis was over. Then they heard screams in the middle of the night. By the time they got to him, he was dead. He died in the middle of a nightmare. Here was a youngster having a vision of a horror that everyone older was denying. That became the central line of Nightmare on Elm Street.”
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Dahmer (2002)
Jeremy Renner starred as the notorious serial killer in this horror biopic that includes fictional versions of several of Dahmer’s victims. Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, ultimately took the lives of 17 boys and men.
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Black Water (2007)
Set in the swamps of Australia, this movie sees a group of fishers attacked by a humongous crocodile. It was inspired by an actual crocodile attack in the Australian outback in 2003 that killed a man named Brett Mann in an area that his friends said they’d “never, ever” seen a crocodile before.
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Dead Ringers (1988)
In David Cronenberg’s movie, Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists who do messed up things with patients and ultimately die together in the end. Cronenberg adapted the movie from Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s novel Twins, which was inspired by the lives of actual twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus. The New York Timesnoted that the Marcuses enjoyed “trading places to fool their patients” and that they ultimately “retreat[ed] into heavy drug use and utter isolation.”
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Deliver Us From Evil (2014)
The movie follows a cop and a priest who team up to take on the supernatural. It’s based on self-proclaimed “demonologist” Ralph Sarchie’s memoir Beware the Night, in which he tells supposedly true stories, such as the time he found himself "in the presence of one of hell's most dangerous devils" possessing a woman.
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Poltergeist (1982)
In Poltergeist, a family’s home is invaded by ghosts that abduct one of the daughters. The film was inspired by unexplained events, such as loud popping noises and moved objects, that occurred in 1958 at the Hermanns’ home in Seaford, New York.
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Psycho (1960)
Alfred Hitchcock’s essential film traces a woman who embezzles money from her employer and runs off to a mysterious hotel where she is (58-year-old spoiler alert) murdered by the man running it, Norman Bates. Bates is said to have been based on Ed Gein, a Wisconsin man who was convicted for one murder in the 1950s, but suspected for others. He also was a grave robber, and authorities found many disturbing results of that in his home, including bowls crafted from human skulls and a lampshade made from the skin of someone’s face.
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Scream (1996)
The classic ‘90s slasher flick uses dark humor to tell the story of a group of teens and a mystery man named Ghostface who wants to murder them. But the real story ain’t funny. The movie was inspired by the Gainesville Ripper, real name Danny Rolling, who killed five Florida students by knife over a span of three days in August 1990.
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11 of 30
The Amityville Horror (1979)
In the movie, a young couple buys a house in Amityville, New York, and it turns out to be haunted by supernatural evils. The real-life Lutz family moved to an Amityville home in 1975 about a year after Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered six family members there. The Lutzes moved out after just 28 days, citing strange odors, sounds, gelatinous drops, and other terrifying phenomena.
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The Conjuring (2013)
The movie stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as ghost hunters helping out a family in a haunted 18th-century farmhouse. The hunters, Ed and Lorraine Warren, are real people, as is the Perron family that they assist. Lorraine was a consultant on the movie and insists that many of the supernatural horrors really happened, and one of the daughters who is depicted in the film, Andrea Perron, says the same. She recalled an angry spirit named Bathsheba to USA Today: “Whoever the spirit was, she perceived herself to be mistress of the house and she resented the competition my mother posed for that position.”
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The Conjuring 2 (2016)
In the sequel to The Conjuring, the paranormal investigators head to England to unravel the mysteries of the Hodgson family’s Enfield council house. It’s based on the supposed story of a young girl who was possessed by the Enfield Poltergeist that would “talk” through her. “We didn’t understand what was happening,” the girl’s sister told People. “We went through periods where we just couldn’t believe what happened really. It’s frightening. We didn’t like to be on your own in the house or anything.”
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Annabelle (2014)
The creepy porcelain doll from The Conjuring gets her terror on in this spin-off of The Conjuring. The ghost-hunting Warrens have claimed that there was a real Raggedy Ann doll that moved by itself and wrote creepy-ass notes saying things like, “Help us.” The woman who owned it contacted a medium, who claimed that it was possessed by a seven-year-old girl named Annabelle who had died there.
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The Disappointments Room (2016)
Kate Beckinsale stars in the movie as an architect who moves to a new home with a mysterious room in the attic that she eventually learns was previously used as a room where rich people would cast off disabled children. It was reportedly inspired by a Rhode Island woman who discovered a similar room in her house that she says was built by a 19th century judge to lock away his disabled daughter.
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The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
The movie’s title character is a 19-year-old girl who dies following an exorcism, and the film focuses on the trial of the priest who performed it. It’s based on the real 1976 case of Anneliese Michel, a German woman who died at the age of 23 from starvation following 67 exorcisms to rid her of supposed demons.
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The Exorcist (1973)
Two priests attempt to remove a demon from a young girl in this box office smash. The movie was based on a 1949 Washington Post article with the headline “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip.” Director William Friedkin spoke about the article to Time Out London: “Maybe one day they’ll discover the cause of what happened to that young man, but back then, it was only curable by an exorcism. His family weren’t even Catholics, they were Lutheran. They started with doctors and then psychiatrists and then psychologists and then they went to their minister who couldn’t help them. And they wound up with the Catholic church. The Washington Post article says that the boy was possessed and exorcised. That’s pretty out on a limb for a national newspaper to put on its front page… You’re not going to see that on the front page of an intelligent newspaper unless there’s something there.
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The Girl Next Door (2007)
The movie follows the abuse of a teenage girl at the hands of her aunt, and it was inspired by the murder of Sylvia Likens in 1965. The 16-year-old girl was abused by her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, Baniszewski’s children, and other neighborhood children, as entertainment. They ultimately killed her, with the cause of death determined as “brain swelling, internal hemorrhaging of the brain, and shock induced by Sylvia's extensive skin damage,” according to The Indianapolis Star.
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The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)
Ed and Lorraine Warren strike again! The couple claimed that a Connecticut home rented by the Snedeker family in 1986 had been overtaken by demons, likely because the building was previously a mortuary. In the movie, a fictional Campbell family is tormented by supernatural beings.
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The Hills Have Eyes (1977 & 2006)
Wes Craven’s cult classic (and its remake) centers around a traveling family whose car breaks down, leaving them stranded and in the clutches of cannibals. The movie was inspired by Sawney Bean, a Scottish man who, according to legend, led his clan to kill and eat 1,000 people around the year 1600. A Scottish historian told The BBC in 2013 though that the legend was fiction, created by prejudiced Englishmen “as a dig at Scots.”
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The Possession (2012)
Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick star in the movie as a couple with a young daughter who becomes fascinated with an antique wooden box found at a yard sale. Of course, the box turns out to be home to a spirit. The flick’s “true story” basis came from an eBay listing for “a haunted Jewish wine cabinet box” containing oddities such as two locks of hair, one candlestick, and an evil spirit that caused supernatural activity. The box sold for $280 and gained attention when a Jewish newspaper ran an article about its so-called powers.
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The Rite (2011)
In The Rite, a mortician enrolls in seminary and eventually takes an exorcism class in Rome, where demonic encounters ensue. The movie was based on the life of a real exorcist, Father Gary Thomas, whose work was the focus of journalist Matt Baglio’s book The Rite: The Making of an Exorcist. A Roman Catholic priest, Thomas was one of 14 Vatican-certified exorcists working in America in 2011. He served as an advisor on the film and told The Los Angeles Times that in the previous four years he had exorcised five people.
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The Sacrament (2013)
In the movie, a man travels to find his sister who joined a remote religious commune, where, yep, bad things happen. It was inspired by the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which cult leader Jim Jones led 909 of his followers to partake in a “murder-suicide ceremony” using cyanide poisoning.
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The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece is about a man who is driven to insanity by supernatural forces while staying at a remote hotel in the Rockies. The movie derives from Stephen King’s book of the same name, which was inspired by the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where plenty of guests have reported seeing ghosts. The Stanley wasn’t actually used in the movie, however, because Kubrick didn’t think it looked scary enough.
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The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
The Oscar-winning film tells the story of an FBI cadet who enlists the help of a cannibal/serial killer to pin down another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, who skins the bodies of his victims. FBI special agent John Douglas, who consulted on the film, has explained that Bill was inspired in part by the serial killer Ted Bundy, who like Bill, wore a fake cast. Ed Gein is also believed to be an inspiration, what with the whole skinning thing. And per Rolling Stone, 1980s killer Gary Heidnik was a reference for how Buffalo Bill kept victims in a basement pit.
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The Strangers (2008)
Three killers in masks terrorize the suburban home of a couple (played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman) in this invasion thriller. Writer-director Bryan Bertino has said the film was inspired by something that happened to him in childhood. "As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it,” he said. "At the door were some people asking for somebody that didn't live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses."
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974 & 2003)
Ed Gein also reportedly inspired elements of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its remake. The movies are about groups of friends who come into contact with the murderous cannibal Leatherface. The original film memorably features a room filled with furniture created from human bones, a nod to Gein’s home.
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The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976 & 2014)
The original film follows a Texas Ranger as he tracks down a serial killer threatening a small town, and the 2014 sequel of the same name essentially revives the same plot. Both are based on the Texarkana Moonlight Murders of 1946, when a “Phantom Killer” took out five people over ten weeks. The case remains officially unsolved.
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Veronica (2018)
The recent Netflix release follows a 15-year-old girl who uses a Ouija board and accidentally connects with a demon that terrorizes her and her family. The movie’s based on a real police report from a Madrid neighborhood. As the story goes, a girl performed a séance at school and then “experienced months of seizures and hallucinations, particularly of shadows and presences surrounding her,” according to Newsweek. The police report came a year after the girl’s death when three officers and the Chief Inspect of the National Police reported several unnatural occurrences at her family’s home that they called “a situation of mystery and rarity.”
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Winchester (2018)
Helen Mirren stars in the movie as a firearm manufacturer’s widow who thinks she is being haunted by the ghosts of people who were killed by the rifles of her husband’s company. The mansion she lives in is based on a real place, known as the Winchester Mystery House, which the real-life woman who Mirren plays spent 38 years constructing and renovating as she lived there. Legend has it she was taking building direction from spirits, with a tour guide telling Vanity Fairthat Ms. Winchester would have séances at night and then give new building plans to her foreman in the morning.
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