Many of us love a good horror movie. The thrill of seeing a chase without actually being a victim ourselves, the was we feel gross and disturbed when something nasty happens, that healthy level of paranoia it gives us about strangers… the adrenaline rush as a whole is just amazing. But it only really works if it’s all fake. If we were watching an actual, real killing, we wouldn’t be quite so happy. And yet, unknowingly, we’ve watched a few recreations of real events, protagonized by bona-fide real life monsters. Here are ten such films where the monster actually comes from closer to our world than we would like…
1: The movie: The Girl Next Door
The fake monster: When two young girls need to live with their aunt after their parents die, their aunt turns out to by a sadistic psychopath who wants to take out her anger on the girls. She tortures them and sexually abuses them, with the community’s children quietly accepting the matters going on behind the door, sometimes even getting involved.
The real life version: When Sylvia Likens and her sister were left to be cared for by Gertrude Baniszewski, a life of true torment began. Gertrude was going through financial troubles and did not know how to handle them. In her deranged state, she began abusing Sylvia. She beat her, force fed her, starved her and sexually abused her. She even encouraged her own children and neighbourhood children to get involved, also beating and assaulting her. Sylvia eventually died at the age of sixteen, tied up in a basement, suffering from mental shock, a brain hemorrhage and malnutrition.
2: The movie: A Nightmare on Elm Street
The fake monster: Freddy Krueger, a hideously deformed man, chooses his victims carefully. He hunts them down, he follows their every move, waiting until they are asleep… A monster, he enters their dreams and uses a glove with razor-sharp blades attached to kill his victims in their dreams, at which point, they die in real life.
The real life version: Fortunately for everyone, there was no real man who was Freddy Krueger. But the concept of the dream monster comes from a real life event that defies explanation. Wes Craven, the author, based on a series of articles in a paper. These articles described Asian refugees mysteriously dying in their sleep. They would become paranoid before, become convinced that if they went to sleep they would die, and go to great lengths to stay awake. However eventually they succumbed to sleep… only to die overnight. Not of anything obvious, no heart attack, no stroke… just die of nothing at all. Sweet dreams.
3: The movie: Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, Deranged, etc
The fake monster: A deranged man with a mommy or woman complex goes around killing people to consume and wear their flesh, or turn their bodies into little puppets to decorate his house.
The real life version: Ed Gein. Unlike many serial killers, who have a very limited film life, Ed Gein is timeless and endless… specifically because he is so weird and unpredictable. Ed Gein was obsessed with his mother, believing she was the only person who could care for him and vice versa. When she died, he descended into madness. He began digging up recently deceased women who resembled her. He began propping them up as company. He made clothes out of their skin. He ate them. He even resorted to killing when fresh graves weren’t available. Ed Gein was odd in that he is one of very few such criminals whose motives apparently lacked any sexual drive at all. He simply wanted his mother back.
4: The movie: Ravenous
The fake monster: Boyd, a Second Lieutenant during the Mexican-American war gets a taste for blood after faking his death and being forced to share a cart with dead bodies. He discovers the Wendigo myth that anyone who consumes the flesh of his enemies gains their power. Boyd is again forced to eat human flesh for survival. The film contrasts Boyd’d reluctance to eat human flesh with Ives, another character’s, urge to consume it.
The real life version: Cannibalism out of necessity is not a new thing. Throughout all of history people have become stranded on desert islands, on battlefields and in the wilderness with dead bodies, being forced to eat human flesh. It is the natural disgust at this act that makes the cannibal so horrific in this case: he has no choice, and we may be forced to do the same if we were in his situation.
5: The movie: Borderland
The fake monster: A Mexican gang protecting its turf resorts to horrific means of dissuading enemies and getting rid of spies. Not only that, but they believe deeply in a form of voodoo and wish to sacrifice humans to protect their cargo of drugs from law enforcement. They torture their victims to death, removing body part after body part for their ritual.
The real life version: Although in the film the gang is less dominated by one person and more a faceless entity, the inspiration lies with one man: Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo. Adolfo was a leader of a gang slash cult, Los Narco-saranicos, or drug satanists, for those who were wondering. Adolfo believed that magic spells explained the success of some drug cartels over other and attempted to infiltrate them, to no avail. When he was rejected, he responded, obviously, by killing cartel members. From then onwards he believed that torture, mutilation and death were making him stronger and continued to kill people, including innocent strangers.
6: The movie: The Dentist
The fake monster: As if going to the dentist wasn’t bad enough, now we have this nightmare to contend with. An extremely successful dentist discovers on his wedding anniversary that his wife is cheating on him. As he suffers a meltdown he hallucinates vividly, injuring and then eventually killing his patients.
The real life version: Glennon Edward Engleman was a dentist who had a part time job as a hitman. He was a complete sociopath and enjoyed both the killing and getting paid to do it. He came up with various methods of disposing of his victims, including bludgeoning, shooting and bombing. No word as to whether he killed any at the surgery…
7: The movie: The Curse of the Zodiac
The fake monster: A killer terrorizes the San Francisco Bay area, murdering apparently completely random people and then taunting law enforcement with letters in cryptic symbols and code. The people of San Francisco remain terrified, never sure who will be next.
The real life version: Only there was a real Zodiac killer, wasn’t there? And s/he was never caught. The killer claimed numerous killings to their own name, taunted the police with incredibly complex code and cypher, even dropping hints about the next killings. Was it a very clever scam artist? An actual killer? A series of people? We will never know.
8: The movie: Eaten Alive
The fake monster: An insane hotel owner wants to get away with all sorts of things, and nobody will stand in his way. As he descends into madness and turns on each and every person who seems to have slighted him, he kills them and feeds them to his pet alligator.
The real life version: A man named Joe Ball owned a little bar in a tiny Texas town. And out back he kept an alligator pit. I’m sure you can see where this is going. Joe was found guilty of murdering 20 women, but the bodies were nowhere to be found. When the police approached Joe he shot himself before they could ask him any questions, but a handyman who worked for him located two of the bodies. The rest would have been long since gone…
9: The movie: Wolf Creek
The fake monster: A serial killer stalks and investigates backpacking tourists on the Western Australian roads and, under the guise of helping them find their way, kidnaps, tortures and kills them. His house is full of mementos from every person he has kidnapped and killed.
The real life version: The killer is based off two separate real life serial killers. Ivan Milat, a second generation Croatian immigrant to Australia, found foreign backpackers who he kidnapped, tortured and killed. Over a decade later, Bradley John Murdoch followed in Milat’s footsteps, first abducting and raping people before finally kidnapping and killing Peter Falconio, a British tourist who was backpacking through the outback. We think the message here is: don’t backpack through Western Australia.
10: The movie: Primeval
The fake monster: A couple of American news agents set off deep into Burundi in order to find a man-eating crocodile to run a report on it. It turns out the crocodile is real… and a twenty five foot long prehistoric type of beast that has a healthy appetite for human flesh.
The real life version: Yes, there really is a giant crocodile in Burundi that eats people. His name is Gustave and he is a mere twenty feet long and around sixty five years old! Gustave has a bit of a taste for human flesh and will happily chow down on anyone small enough for him. Which would be most people. Unsurprisingly, he has eaten over 300 people in his life.