The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories

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.

Driven by a marketing campaign playing up its supposedly truthful bona fides, this haunted house tale became a significant leftfield success during the post-The Exorcist horror boom of the late ‘70s. Based on the book by Jay Anson, it depicts the supernatural harassment experienced by the Lutz family upon moving into an old house in Long Island that had previously been the site of a grisly mass murder. Of course, critics have long dismissed Anson’s book as a hoax, but that didn’t stop the movie from becoming a horror classic, spinning off numerous lesser sequels and inspiring a 2005 remake from Michael Bay.

Ed and Lorraine Warren were semi-famous paranormal investigators before director James Wan decided to turn their most well-known case into a throwback haunted house movie and made them perhaps the most famous ghost hunters in the world. Who else in their field can claim to have inspired the most successful horror franchise of all-time? The so-called ‘Conjuring Universe’ has spun off in several directions now – including the Annabelle movies – but the first film takes its inspiration directly from the Warrens’ account of investigating supernatural activity at a crumbling farmhouse in Rhode Island back in 1971. It gleefully mashes up numerous classic horror tropes, including many jump scares, and proved that Wan, previously known for the torture porn Saw franchise, could conjure up more than just nausea. 

Three years after The Amityville Horror, director Tobe Hooper effectively ‘Spielbergised’ the modern haunted house movie – with an assist from Steven Spielberg himself, who produced and possibly, maybe ghost-directed some of it – turning in a horror classic. And like Amityville, it takes inspiration from an actual haunting. In the 1950s, the curious case of the Hermann house in suburban Long Island became a national media story after the family brought in a paranormal investigator to diagnose unusual activity, such as randomly popping bottles and objects moving on their own. The house did not ultimately vanish into an interdimensional portal, however.    

The incident that inspired this indie thriller didn’t end in death or involve any sort of bloodshed, but it is nonetheless deeply disturbing – and not without torture. In 2004, a man claiming to be a police officer called a fast-food restaurant in rural Kentucky and managed to convince the employee who answered to strip search her coworker, the first in a series of rapidly mounting indignities. Craig Zobel’s claustrophobic drama doesn’t exploit the humiliation of what turned out to be an incredibly fucked-up prank call but uses it as a springboard to explore the American fealty to authority.

John Christie is perhaps second to Jack the Ripper as London’s most infamous serial killer, an unassuming postman who, in the 1940s and ‘50s, strangled at least eight women, including his wife, and hid their corpses in the walls of his Notting Hill flat. Richard Fleischer’s account of his killing spree is an under-seen gem of the true crime genre, featuring a truly chilling lead performance from Richard Attenborough, which the actor claimed haunted him for a long while afterward.  

It’s one of those scenarios your subconscious always seems to generate just as your moments away from drifting off to sleep: wouldn’t it absolutely suck to go scuba diving and end up stranded in the middle of the ocean? Americans Tom and Eileen Lonergan lived that nightmare in 1998, when the boat taking tourists out to explore the Great Barrier Reef accidentally departed without them. Whoops! How long they actually ‘lived’ is unclear – their bodies were never found. But filmmaker Chris Kentis has an idea of what happened to them, and it involves a horde of hungry sharks. Watching a helpless couple on the verge of becoming bobbing meat snacks doesn’t sound like much of a movie premise, but Kentis – who shot in the actual ocean, using real-live sharks – lends the incident a severely anxious realism that keeps your stomach sufficiently tied for 80 minutes.

Is it possible for a movie to seem too real? In its account of the so-called ‘barrel murders’ that haunted a poor Australian suburb in the 1990s, Snowtown lives alongside Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as a film that brings viewers a little too close to the darkest corners of humanity to qualify as ‘entertainment’. For seven years, a group of four men, led by John Bunting, carried out a series of gruesome slayings, mostly targeting alleged pedophiles and homosexuals. Director Justin Kurzel focuses particularly on how Bunting recruited an abused teenager into assisting him, and spares few details. No, it’s not something you casually throw on during a boring night in. But if you’re ever compelled to stare directly into the abyss of the human psyche, there may be no darker portal in movies.

Unlike practically everything else in his oeuvre, whose influence has only grown over time, Alfred Hitchcock’s most ludicrous film looks increasingly absurd with age, standing closer to The Blob or The Day of the Triffids than Psycho. But the story isn’t just some bizarre flash of inspiration he had after having his lunch stolen by a pigeon: in 1961, birds in the coastal town of Capitola, California, suddenly began dive-bombing homes and cars and vomiting up half-digested food. It took scientists years to determine that their mania was caused by toxic algae, and not any of the more metaphorical theories Hitch seemed to suggest: nature turning against man, female sexual repression, etc. In any case, for all its goofiness, it still managed to make the sight of a flock of seagulls standing together forever seem vaguely menacing.  

Imagine the look of deranged glee that spread across David Cronenberg’s face when he read a New York magazine article about the Marcus brothers, twin gynaecologists who died simultaneously of drug overdoses in 1975. Cronenberg, of course, wildly embellishes their shared decline, using the case as a jumping off point to examine male sexual anxiety, among other things, in the most skincrawling, off-putting, distinctly Cronenbergian way possible.

Nineties kids remember Alive, the harrowing story of a Uruguayan rugby team who resorted to eating their dead teammates to survive after a plane crash in the Andes. Nineties kids almost certainly do not remember this box-office bomb, the decade’s other true cannibal tale. Well, sort of true – yes, Guy Pearce’s character, Capt. John Boyd, is based on Alfred Packer, a prospector who ate five members of his own party after getting trapped traversing the mountains of Colorado in 1874. No, he did not turn into a flesh-craving lunatic after being rescued. Packer’s life also inspired another, even more fabricated pseudo-biopic: 1993’s Cannibal! The Musical, directed by future South Park co-creator Trey Parker.

In the late ‘80s, the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas was terrorised by a group of so-called ‘narcosatanists’, a clan of drug-dealing occultists who practised ritual human sacrifice as a means of assisting their associated cartel. This effectively freaky indie horror flick dramatises the events surrounding the cult’s most widely publicised crime, the abduction and subsequent murder of a University of Texas medical student in 1989. While the film embellishes the details, a lot of it is more factual than you might think – a horrifying thought. 

In ultra-religious circles, exorcisms are, of course, a very real and not outmoded practice – even The Exorcist was loosely based on an actual incident – but The Exorcism of Emily Rose is more specific in its inspiration. In 1975, a young German woman named Anneliese Michel began experiencing seizures and hallucinations. At the behest of her Catholic parents, two local priests initiated dozens of exorcism rites until she eventually died from malnutrition. Her parents were then charged with negligent homicide. Director Scott Derrickson blends those facts with a liberal sprinkling of fiction, creating an interesting mix of psychological thriller, demonic horror and courtroom drama.

Alien abduction may stretch the definition for ‘true story’, and sceptics have certainly tried to throw doubt on logger Travis Walton’s account of being sucked into a spaceship, violently probed, then deposited on the side of an Arizona highway. Whether or not it actually happened – and for the record, Walton and his coworkers who witnessed his alleged extraterrestrial kidnapping have all passed polygraph tests – the depiction of Walton’s abduction in Fire in the Sky is one of the most horrifying scenes in ‘90s cinema: vivid, nightmarish and worst of all, totally believable.   

It’s not a great movie, even with Helen Mirren in the lead role, but it is a great, weird piece of lore. As the legend goes, after the sudden passing of her husband, gunmaker William Winchester, his widow, Sarah, began making odd additions to their Northern California mansion – hundreds of extra rooms, random doors, stairways to nowhere – supposedly at the behest of the spirits of those killed by her namesake rifle. It’s mostly hogwash: the renovations were primarily the result of hasty repairs following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. But hey, when choosing between myth and fact, film the myth.