Anyone with a passing interest in true crime is familiar with the Zodiac Killer, who terrorised San Francisco with a string of still-unsolved murders in the 1960s. But David Fincher’s chilling masterpiece is less about the slayings – though he re-enacts several of them in unnerving detail – than the rabbit hole the killer opened up with the maddening puzzles and coded messages he disseminated through the press. The case fully consumed political cartoonist Robert Graysmith, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, whose decades-long obsession with uncovering the Zodiac’s identity cost him his marriage. Given how, every few years, some new theory arises about who committed the killings, he’s clearly far from the only one.
‘It’s only a movie’. At one point or another, you’ve likely repeated that phrase to yourself whenever watching a particularly terrifying horror film, to bring yourself down from an anxiety attack or stave off any potential nightmares. But what happens when a movie isn’t just a movie? What if what you’re watching actually happened? Sure, you might be able to convince yourself that the filmmakers are embellishing the facts for cinematic effect, and that’s usually true… but not always.
In these 15 frightening films based on actual events, you might find some truth being stretched, but the stories skew a bit too close to reality for comfort. Don’t freak out, though: for you, it really is still just a movie. Just keep in mind that for someone else, it was reality.
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