The horror films you thought were fiction – but were inspired by terrifying true stories ...Middle East

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)

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)

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.

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).

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)

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).

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.

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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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 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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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)

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)

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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