Horror movies often enjoy throwing a little embellished reality into the mix. The idea that something “really” happened can add a little energy to the scare, acting as an all more real instance of finishing a spooky story around the campfire with “and it happened right here in these woods.”

Reality can be far more frightening than any fantasy, and many of the shining gems of the horror genre have their beginning in all too normal terrors. Some of them came from headlines, others from far more personal places, but all of them left a seed of the real world amid their otherwise make-believe monsters. Let's look at some of the most notable horror movies that are based on true stories.

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Psycho (1960)

The progenitor of slasher films began life as a novel by Robert Bloch, who based it very closely on the Ed Gein murders from the 1950s. Gein stole corpses from nearby cemeteries in the Wisconsin town where he lived, then made trophies and clothing out of their bones and skin. He also murdered two women himself before mutilating their corpses in a similar fashion. Under Bloch’s (and eventually Hitchcock's) reimagining, Gein became hotel owner Norman Bates, who murdered his mother and her lover in a jealous rage and adopted a psychotic variation of his mother’s identity. Psycho became a landmark and served as the inspiration for similar movies, such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which also drew heavily from the Gein case.

The Exorcist (1973)

Novelist William Peter Blatty penned The Exorcist after reading about a real-life exorcism the Catholic Church performed on a Maryland boy in 1949. At least seven Jesuit priests took part in the ordeal, most of it occurring in the upstairs bedroom of a family home in St. Louis. Blatty was fascinated by the presence of such an overtly supernatural ritual taking place in modern American society. His book, and the movie that followed, played straight into the disparity. As Regan McNeil descends from an apparent psychological malady into something that utterly defies modern science, her mother is reluctantly dragged towards the only solution that she hasn’t tried -- one with crosses and holy water.

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The Amityville Horror (1979)

The Amityville Horror franchise is one of the most strangely diverse in horror films, encompassing not just the titular franchise and its 2006 reboot but the Conjuring series as well, whose protagonists played a part in the actual events that inspired the film. The truth of the matter is that it was largely a hoax. Though Ron DeFeo did murder his family in the infamous house in 1974, it was subsequently purchased at a discount by George Lutz, who fled with his family less than a month later, claiming supernatural manifestation. Lutz was in deep financial trouble at the time, and his lawyer later admitted that they made the whole haunting up “over many bottles of wine." But their jumped-up campfire tale sparked the public imagination, leading first to a bestselling book and eventually to the hit movie.

The Shining (1980)

Jack Nicholson in The Shining

Author Stephen King famously disliked Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, about a family with a psychic child trapped in a haunted hotel for the winter. Part of his complaint was that Kubrick focused on the hotel at the expense of the family. As it turns out, there were some strong reasons for his beliefs. King is a recovering addict, as he candidly discussed in his 2000 book On Writing, and Jack Torrance was a reflection of his own personal terrors about what kind of monster alcoholism might turn him into. Shades of it remain in the Kubrick film, mostly in small details. During his talk with Lloyd at the bar, for instance, Jack dry-pops aspirin, a detail from the book that King inserted based on his own behavior, and the hotel itself makes a fine stand-in for his addiction and the power it held over him. Speaking of the hotel, it too was inspired by a real location -- the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, where King stayed once while living in nearby Boulder in the midst of his addiction.

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A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

A Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven’s groundbreaking story of a literal boogeyman who murders teenagers in their sleep was inspired by a real-life incident that Craven recounted reading about in the Los Angeles Times. A local teenager -- a survivor of the Killing Fields of Cambodia -- had died in his sleep after going to extreme lengths to stay awake. Family members reported that he was terrified of falling asleep, resorting to caffeine pills and even a coffee maker hidden in his room. The story struck a chord with the director, who combined it with an early experience from his own childhood in which a strange old man went out of his way to terrorize him. As a final touch, he added the name of his own bully from childhood to A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Freddy Krueger was born.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

The Silence Of The Lambs

Like Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs draws its inspiration from real-life serial killers. However, The Silence of the Lambs also includes an accurate look at the way the FBI hunts such killers and the forensic methods used to identify their modus operandi. Its murderer, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, combines the methods of several actual killers in the way he stalks his victims. In addition to Gein, whom he emulates by sewing a suit out of human skin, he also reflects the tactics of Ted Bundy, who would often feign injury in order to get his victims to lower their guard, and Gary Heidnik, who kept his victims in a pit while he tortured them.

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