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The horror films you thought were fiction – but were inspired by terrifying true stories
As if these movies weren't scary enough already...
Bryanston Pictures
- Jeremy Aspinall
Published: Thursday, 29 October 2026 at 7:00 am
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From The Amityville Horror to The Conjuring, plenty of horror films have a basis in fact, however loosely.
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But, what about the scary movies where the truth is more surprising and ghastlier than the fictional on-screen depiction?
Here are 10 films that fit the bill – and be warned, there are gristly details of real-life cases below...
Psycho (1960)
Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho. Screen Archives/Getty Images
Three years before Alfred Hitchcock shook up cinema audiences and the horror genre itself, not least for that shower scene, an unassuming 51-year-old Wisconsin farmer called Ed Gein hit the headlines when police discovered the decapitated body of a local woman hanging in his shed. A further search of his property then revealed a charnel house of horror containing human skulls, bones and assorted body parts, seemingly from his exhumation of recently buried corpses.
Author Robert Bloch was writing the original Psycho novel at the time of the arrest but despite living within 40 miles of the crime scene, he only alluded to Gein in the later chapters. If anything, it was the circumstances of the case that informed Bloch’s original premise of a small-town monster living in plain sight… or next door. He also stated Norman Bates was not based on the Wisconsin killer.
Indeed, the 1960 film shunned the more gruesome details of the actual crimes, instead amplifying Bates’s obsession with his domineering dead mother, a trait coincidentally shared with Gein. Nevertheless, even the author had to admit the similarities in act and motivation of the fictional Bates and the real-life Gein.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Marilyn Burns as Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. LMPC via Getty Images
If Psycho avoided the more ghoulish aspects of the Gein case, then the same cannot be said of director Tobe Hooper’s notorious, low-budget shocker, which was banned in the UK for decades and only released uncut in 1999. Having grown up hearing stories of a house with “human skin lampshades and furniture”, Hooper created one “that said and smelled and tasted of death” for his terrifying tale of teenagers falling foul of a family of crazed cannibals in the Texas backwoods.
Despite the title, Hooper’s second feature is surprisingly sparing in gore, but once the teens enter a farmhouse filled with skin-covered, “bone-made” furniture, an intense atmosphere of relentless terror is unleashed, just as the masked Leatherface makes his first drop-dead appearance.
It is here the Gein comparisons are more palpable: the gruesome décor (and contents) of the fictional house; the human-skin masks worn by the hulking Leatherface; victims hung on meat hooks like slaughtered cattle; and the prolific grave-robbing. All were mirrored in Wisconsin in 1957.
Wolf Creek (2005)
Although marketed as “based on true events”, this effective Aussie survival thriller leant into familiar horror territory (think The Hitcher) as it chronicled the plight of three backpackers who are befriended, then tormented and hunted by enigmatic serial killer Mick Taylor (John Jarratt).
However, while writing the original Wolf Creek screenplay, director Greg McLean changed it from an out-and-out slasher film after learning about Ivan Milat, the so-called “Backpacker Murderer”, who was convicted of killing seven young people (two men and five women) in New South Wales between 1989 and 1993.
Milat refused to confess to the crimes and spent his time in prison from 1996 until his death in 2019 filing appeals, notwithstanding the fact he was suspected of many other unsolved deaths and disappearances. Meanwhile, the Mick Taylor character would return in a 2013 sequel and in a third instalment that began shooting in 2026.
The Exorcist (1973)
Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Sky Premiere
The lore surrounding William Friedkin’s landmark supernatural chiller is plentiful. Some said the controversial box-office hit that spawned a litany of similarly themed imitators was cursed because of the untimely deaths of cast (Jack MacGowran) and crew, on-set injuries to Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair, and an electrical fire that destroyed a major set. Rumours of cinemagoers fainting from fright, needing therapy or tearing the paper from the walls to drown out the Oscar-winning sound continue to circulate.
However, what is not doubted is that author/screenwriter William Peter Blatty found his inspiration for The Exorcist while studying at Georgetown University in Washington (the film’s main location) where he read local newspaper accounts of an exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in Mount Rainier, Maryland, in 1949. Blatty had once considered the priesthood himself and began looking into other incidents of alleged demonic possession such as the 1928 exorcism of a woman from Earling, Iowa (later the source for 2025 thriller The Ritual).
However, it’s the 1949 event that he was encouraged to research by Jesuit priest Thomas Bermingham, Blatty’s Latin tutor-cum-mentor who acted as technical adviser on the 1973 film, made a small cameo and was even asked by Friedkin to exorcise the set because of the aforementioned “curse”. We can only hope the filming of 2027’s The Exorcist: Martyrs from director Mike Flanagan didn't have any disturbing secrets to reveal.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)
This 21st-century take on exorcism as the cure for alleged demonic possession is a courtroom drama-cum-horror flick, in which Tom Wilkinson’s on-trial Catholic priest denies the negligent homicide of a 19-year-old American student, claiming she was possessed rather than suffering from a medical condition.
Although not credited, the true-story foundation of the tale is a young German woman, Anneliese Michel, who as a teenager was treated for epilepsy-induced psychosis and depression. However, by her 20s and despite medication, her condition had deteriorated – only now she was hearing voices, seeing shadowy figures and panicking around Christian symbols like crosses and bibles. Jesuit priests were called in and, with permission from the local bishop, embarked on a series of exorcisms – 67 of them! – which took place across 1975 and 1976.
Anneliese did not survive and the cause of death was given as malnutrition and dehydration following the regular priestly interventions, recordings of which were claimed to contain “demons arguing”. The verdict: her parents and two priests were found guilty of negligent homicide and given six-month suspended prison sentences. Unlike the relatively uplifting ending to the more supernaturally tinged 2005 movie, the trial sent shockwaves through a Germany that regarded itself as a highly rational and secular nation.
The Stepfather (1987)
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A genuine cult gem that was followed by a 1989 sequel, a 1993 TV movie and a 2009 remake, this psychological horror starred Terry O’Quinn as a seemingly upstanding real-estate man who has recently married and moved in with a young widow and her 16-year-old daughter. His relationship with the latter is strained but little does the teenager know her stepdad has a history of becoming part of a family that he kills later, before adopting a fresh identity to groom more victims elsewhere.
Surely too macabre to be true, but in fact a man called John List was the template that inspired the film. Like O’Quinn’s chameleon-esque mass murderer, not only did List kill his family in their suburban home and move on to a new life, but he also used to “go to work” to keep up appearances despite losing his job. Even more incredible, List was still on the run when the picture was released in 1987. He was finally caught two years later after being on the run for nearly 18 years. Five consecutive life terms awaited the then-63-year-old fugitive.
The Sacrament (2013)
By 2013, the found-footage subgenre was at its prolific peak, complete with burgeoning mini-franchises like Rec, Paranormal Activity and V/H/S. Film-maker Ti West (The House of the Devil) tried his hand when he directed this slow-burning chiller, in which a film crew flies to Eden Parish, a cult-like community led by the avuncular Father (Gene Jones) and situated in a compound in “a remote part of the world”. However, tension builds when it becomes apparent there’s something rotten at the heart of paradise…
The stark inspiration here is what happened at the Jonestown compound in Guyana in 1978. The Peoples Temple was set up in 1955 by preacher Jim Jones, who believed in the practice of “apostolic socialism”. Over the next 20 years, his project flourished until defections and press investigations convinced an increasingly paranoid Jones to migrate his acolytes to Guyana. Then, in November 1978, following a visit from US Congressman Leo Ryan and his delegation, a mass suicide was ordered by Jones and executed via the consumption of a cyanide-laced soft drink, Flavor Aid.
A total of 918 people died over three locations, a third of them minors, while Ryan and four others were killed as they were about to fly home. Jones was found dead later with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)
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The title of this little-known slasher film may seem sensationalist but the attacks and murders that took place in and around Texarkana — twin cities on the Arkansas/Texas border — were anything but. Over the course of three months in 1946, a hooded man terrorised the area with nocturnal attacks on couples who were courting at the weekend. Two of these incidents resulted in a pair of double murders while the fifth killing occurred in a farmhouse where the owner was shot while sitting in his armchair reading a newspaper. His wife was shot, too, but managed to escape and call for help.
Later dubbed the “Phantom Killer”, the perpetrator was never caught although hundreds of suspects were investigated. Despite director Charles B Pierce playing fast and loose with some of the details of the Texarkana Moonlight Murders, the film produces genuine menace and shock, not least during the film’s climax when Ben Johnson’s Texas Ranger is bearing down on his prey, only to see him escape capture by jumping past a moving train, never to be seen again. Released two years before John Carpenter’s Halloween introduced Michael Myers to audiences and three years before Jason Vorhees took his bow in the original Friday the 13th, Sundown’s influence on masked-slasher flicks should not be underestimated.
Countess Dracula (1971)
Maurice Denham and Ingrid Pitt in Countess Dracula. FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images
If Hammer horror fans were expecting a distaff version of Sir Christopher Lee’s toothsome bloodsucker in 1971, they were disappointed. It’s a pity as star Ingrid Pitt proved impressively vampiric in the likes of The Vampire Lovers (1970) and The House That Dripped Blood (1971). Here, the Hammer icon plays an ageing Hungarian noblewoman whose desire to stay young takes a homicidal turn when she realises virgin blood can restore her beauty, allowing her to subsequently pretend she is her own daughter.
The character is based on a notorious countess, Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614), but it’s the legend of her bathing in blood which drives the screenplay instead of the atrocities that the real-life aristocrat was accused of committing, namely the vicious torture and murder of hundreds of local young women. Initially it was peasant girls that fell victim to her cruelty, but when the daughters of more noble stock began to vanish after entering the Gynaeceum, Bathory’s version of a finishing school, the response and testimonies from those families eventually put her in prison. That said, some historians claim she was the victim of political machinations as much as her own sadistic whims.
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs Orion Pictures
And if you thought Ed Gein (who died in a mental health institute in 1984 at the age of 77) had no more to add to popular culture, Jonathan Demme’s Academy Award-winning psycho-thriller proved otherwise. However, it’s not so much the cannibalistic predilections of incarcerated serial killer Hannibal Lecter (played by Oscar winner Sir Anthony Hopkins), which encourages comparisons. Rather it is “Buffalo Bill”, the target of the FBI manhunt involving Jodie Foster’s rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling.
His modus operandi of kidnapping and murdering young woman so he can remove their skin to make a body suit has echoes of Gein, who raided the local cemeteries to construct his own from corpses that resembled his mother. His confession that he created the skin suit and face masks so he could “become” his dead mum by crawling into her skin is yet another ghoulish prompt from a fiend that keeps on giving.
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Authors
Jeremy Aspinall
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