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The people behind The Conjuring want you to know that it's based on a true story. Like, really want you to know. In the horror flick's latest trailer, there's commentary from the Perron family, the folks who, back in 1971, experienced all kinds of supernatural phenomena after moving into an isolated house in the woods of Harrisville, Rhode Island. Spliced in between movie footage are melodramatic proclamations from Perrons, warning how their story is finally being told because people "weren't ready for it" until now. Cue audience groans.
Fortunately, the Perron's account of dealing with demonic forces is directed by James Wan, the director behind 2011's excellent indie smash Insidious. Meaning, The Conjuring is a first-rate horror film, elegantly directed, full of dread, and featuring a superb cast playing developed characters. The film centers around Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga), the world renown demonologists who, in addition to the Perron case, famously investigated the Long Island house at the center of The Amityville Horror.
Before Ghost Hunters and all of its hokey counterparts, there were the Warrens, the highly respected married couple and forefathers of all current paranormal investigators. Ed, who passed away in 2006, was a demonologist ordained by the Catholic Church; Lorraine—with whom Wan and The Conjuring co-writers Chad and Corey Hayes directly consulted—was the resident clairvoyant. Together, they gave lectures at colleges, wrote several non-fiction books, and spent time in supposedly haunted and/or demon-plagued homes in order to cleanse the properties of all unwanted malevolent guests.
Instead of a biopic, The Conjuring focuses on one specific Warren case and, thanks to Wan's expertise, delivers some of Hollywood's best scares in years. Who knows—in time Wan's film could earn a spot alongside other genre staples of the realistic kind. Here, we trace the real-life inspirations behind classic horror movies to chart the tradition that The Conjuring is currently keeping alive.
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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Whether you're a skeptic or not, one thing's certain about the infamous case that inspired The Amityville Horror: The debates surrounding it aren't going to die down anytime soon. Just last year, in fact, a new documentary, My Amityville Horror, provided the angry, emotionally tortured Daniel Lutz—a youngster when the incidents first occurred—the opportunity to work through his painful memories.
The nightmare began in November 1974. The location: 112 Ocean Avenue, in Long Island, NY. Then-23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr., walked through the home, armed with a .35 caliber rifle, and shot six of his family members—his parents and four younger siblings— to death. Mentally disturbed, DeFeo claimed that he'd heard their voices conspiring against him, thus prompting to act in self defense; as it turned out, he was a heroin and LSD addict and fully cognizant of what he was doing at the time.
Thirteen months after the DeFeo murders, George and Kathy Lutz, along with their three children, moved into the Ocean Ave. house, where a series of, per the Lutz family themselves, supernatural occurrences took place. The kids inexplicably began sleeping on their stomachs, resembling the dead DeFeo kids' bodies; George started imitating things about Ronald DeFeo's life, triggered by the realization that they looked alike; Kathy claimed to have seen demonic red eyes in windows; their youngest daughter, Missy, supposedly befriended an imaginary demon named "Jodie."
The Lutz family left the house after 28 days, leading to now three decades' worth of speculation about what really happened inside 112 Ocean Avenue.
The Exorcist (1973)
The Exorcist, screenwriter William Peter Blatty's adaptation of his own popular 1971 novel, draws from two primary real-life sources. The first pertains to the character of Father Merrin (Max von Sydow). While in Beirut, prior to writing The Exorcist, Blatty met a British archaeologist named Gerald Lankester Harding. As Blatty soon learned, Harding had excavated the caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.
The second, more intriguing influence behind The Exorcist connects to actress Linda Blair's possessed character, 12-year-old Regan McNeil, herself. She's loosely based on a young Maryland boy, who, in 1949, was given an exorcism by famed Catholic exorcist Father Walter Halloran.
Psycho (1960), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
There's no one who's been more influential to the horror genre than Edward Gein. Gein never wrote a screenplay, or directed any features. He never acted, he didn't do makeup. No, Edward Gein was a serial killer; he provided the inspiration for the following characters: Norman Bates in Psycho, Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs.
In 1957, the Plainfield, WI, native confessed to a pair of murders, saying that he killed two local women over a three-year span. When the authorities searched his home, they discovered a treasure trove of horror: chairs covered with human skin, bowls made from skulls, four loose noses, the two victims' severed heads in bags, a belt made from nipples, a lampshade made from a person's face, and 10 heads with the tops cut off, amongst other grotesqueries. OK, one more, for good measure: They also found nine vulvae snipped off and placed in a shoe box.
So, yeah, there's your Chainsaw Massacre connections. As for Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, it was discovered later that, after Gein's abusive mother passed away, he started creating a "woman suit" (i.e., female skin taken from bodies that he'd tanned) so that he could give himself a makeshift sex change.
Child's Play (1988)
Yes, a film about a children's doll possessed by the soul of a dead serial killer was reportedly based on a true incident. Not one about a demonic Teddy Ruxpin, though—the real-life inspiration behind Child's Play had to do with the voodoo ritual that brought that adorably maniacal Chucky doll to life in the first place.
When director/co-writer Don Mancini conceptualized Child's Play, his intentions, aside from making a twisted and original little horror flick, were to layer some commentary on the country's merchandising culture within a film in which a toy calls a kid's mother a "stupid bitch" and "filthy slut." How Chucky becomes animate, though, involves a bit of voodoo used to transfer the soul of murderer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) into the Good Guy doll's frame. And for that, Mancini reportedly took cues from the story of Robert Eugene Otto.
West was a painter and author living in Key West, Florida. In 1906, when Otto was 6-years-old, he received a present, "Robert the Doll," from a Bahamian servant who'd had issues with his family. Otto's family claimed that young Otto would have conversations with Robert, whenever the doll wasn't running around their house and laughing. Whether or not Robert called Otto's mother a "filthy slut" is unknown.
The Blob (1958)
Had The Blob director Irvin Yeaworth stayed faithful to his inspiration, the film would have been titled Star Jelly—meaning, Burt Bacharach's delightfully cheesy opening theme song would sound a lot different. Probably much cornier, too.
The film's inspiration came from a 1950 case in Philadelphia in which police officers found a mysterious "domed disk of quivering jelly." Before the cops could move the jelly, it dissolved right before their eyes. The sticky discovery was thought by those with powerful imaginations to be "star jelly," or the gooey remains found near fallen meteorites—space mold, if you will. Other, more rational folks pegged it as industrial waste, explained by the presence a nearby gas company facility.
Jaws (1975)
Steven Spielberg's Jaws will go down in history as both one of the greatest horror films ever made and the film that kicked off the whole "summer blockbuster" phenomenon. It's also worthy of a third, though less recognized distinction: It's one of cinema's all-time best book-to-film adaptations.
Spielberg's killer shark flick is based on novelist Peter Benchley's 1974 best-seller, which draws inspiration from shark attacks that dampened beach spirits at the Jersey Shore—Long Beach Island, to be exact—in July of 1916. Five swimmers were attacked, with only one able to step out of the water still breathing. On July 14 of that year, a taxidermist/lion tamer, Michael Schleisser, caught a 7.5 foot, 325 pound Great White Shark in Raritan Bay. Once the shark (or, as it was nicknamed, the "Jersey man-eater") was cut open, materials thought to be flesh and bones were discovered within.
After that, no one else was killed in LBI. Personally, we prefer Brody's explosion-via-scuba-tank dispatching of the shark to Schleisser's boring old fishing tactics.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
The legacy of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise is one marked by unsettling dream sequences, elaborately staged death scenes, Freddy Krueger's homicidal ghoul-cum-stand-up-comedian shtick, and numerous sequels. Krueger is a charred-skinned, razor-clawed pedophile who, in death, stalks people in their dreams—pure fantasy, of course. The backstory behind Craven's initial inspirations, however, is grounded in a startling reality.
The idea first hit Craven after the young filmmaker read an LA Times article about some Khmer refugees from Cambodia who'd migrated to America, in response to bombings that ravaged their homeland. The men began experiencing horrific nightmares, some even dying in their sleep. The ones who remained alive wouldn't voluntarily go back to sleep. The sudden deaths baffled doctors. Craven, meanwhile, was intrigued. One case, in particular, fascinated the writer-director. It involved a 21-year-old who, after being awake for days, fell asleep alongside his family while watching TV; in the middle of the night, his family heard crashing sounds coming from his bedroom, and when they went into see what'd happened, he was dead. Autopsy reports showed no signs of a heart attack.
But he didn't know how to make it work in a fictionalized story. That is, until he heard singer Gary Wright's popular 1975 single "Dream Weaver," which turned on the proverbial light bulb above Craven's head.
Dead Ringers (1988)
David Cronenberg's early genre work is typically cited through titles like Videodrome (1983), The Dead Zone (1983), and The Fly (1986). Dead Ringers isn't praised nearly as much as those preceding gems, but, to many of the Canadian filmmaker's devoted fans, it's one of his best movies. It's also based on one of the stranger medical stories you'll ever hear.
Directly inspired by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland's novel Twins, Dead Ringers (more of a horrific psychological drama than straight-up horror) follows twin gynecologists (played by Jeremy Irons) as they battle with drugs, depression, and a bad habit of sharing women.
Wood and Geasland's novel, and, concurrently, Irons' characters in Cronenberg's film, are based on Stewart and Cyril Marcus, real-life twin gynecologists whose dead bodies were found in their New York City apartment in 1975, decomposed. Like the characters in Dead Ringers, the Marcus brothers were addicted to drugs, specifically barbiturates, the same drug that killed Marilyn Monroe.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
In the chilling Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Michael Rooker plays a cold, heartless, and not the least bit remorseful killer. He's a softie compared to the real-life maniac from which he derives.
Calling Henry Lee Lucas a "hypocrite" is just about the nicest thing one could ever say about the psychopathic Virginian. At one point, after being arrested, Lucas wrote a letter that stated "I am not a serial killer," but, in all, he confessed to around 600 murders, bringing the nickname "The Confession Killer" upon himself.
A victim of abuse, Lucas, during his childhood, spent three days in a coma after his mother beat him with a wooden plank. This was a change from her normal behavior: making him watch her have sex with men. She even dressed him up as a girl, and, as reports state, beat him up for accepting a teddy bear from a grade school teacher.
On January 11, 1960, Lucas killed his mother by crushing her neck with broom. After serving 10 years in jail for that, he—per his own accounts—teamed up with friend Ottis Toole and went on a cross-country killing spree. Although only three victims have been directly pegged to Lucas' hand, his claims of about 200 times that have earned Lucas one of pop culture's more notorious serial killer reputations.
And he certainly had no problems with increasing his profile. Although later considered to be bullshit, Lucas' confessions grew increasingly ridiculous before his 2001 passing. Amongst other claims, he told authorities that he killed Jimmy Hoffa and also hand-delivered poison to Jim Jones for the cult leader's Jonestown mass suicide.
The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
Wes Craven sure loves dark folklore. His feature film debut, The Last House on the Left (1972), was inspired by the 13th century Swedish ballad "Töres döttrar i Wänge," which first inspired Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960). For Craven's follow-up, The Hills Have Eyes, the filmmaker redirected his interests to Scotland—specifically, the Sawney Bean saga.
In The Hills Have Eyes, an unlucky family happens across a group of disfigured flesh-eaters who live primitively in the Nevada desert. Way back in the 15th or 16th century, as legend has it, Alexander "Sawney" Bean led a group of 48 followers in killing and subsequently eating more than 1,000 human victims. It makes one hell of a story, with the Bean crew's youngest members said to have been conceived through incest and their targets' leftover limbs found washed up on beaches.
However, a lack of hard evidence has kept the Sawney Bean tale relegated to fiction. Some Scots still believe in Sawney Bean's validity, though, just as they cling to the supposed truth behind the equally speculated Scottish cannibal Christie-Cleek.
The Fog (1980)
Recently re-released in jam-packed new DVD and Blu-ray packages by Scream Factory, John Carpenter's underrated, though beloved, The Fog definitely holds up, 33 years after its theatrical debut. A supernatural departure from the writer-director's previous horror hit, Halloween, The Fog pits a ragtag group of flesh-and-blood people against the vengeful, homicidal ghosts of leprosy-inflicted mariners killed in the (fictional) 1880 shipwreck of the clipper ship known as the Elizabeth Dane.
Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill based the Elizabeth Dane on The Frolic, a clipper ship that crashed into a rocky reef near Goleta, California, in July 1850. The Frolic carried goods used during California's gold rush—after the wreck, the ship's contents were plundered.
The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)
Like The Fog, The Town That Dreaded Sundown was also recently given the plush, features-heavy Scream Factory DVD/Blu-ray revival—consider this the perfect chance to catch up with a true cult classic.
Co-starring Dawn "Mary Ann" Wells (of Gilligan's Island fame), director Charles B. Pierce's film is presented as a fictionalized reenactment, like the ones you'd see in old TV shows like Sightings and Unsolved Mysteries. It's antagonist is the "Phantom Killer," who, between February and May of 1946, committed a string of homicides in the Texarkana (Texarkana, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas), dubbed as "the Moonlight Murders." Of the eight people the Phantom Killer encountered, five lost their lives. The Phantom was never caught.