True horror: 10 movies blamed for real-life murders
Life can imitate art in a number of wonderful ways, but the impact of cinema has also gained the unwanted distinction of inspiring a number of real-world crimes.
Whether it’s theft, arson, or larceny, countless movies have been named either by the perpetrators, defendants, or prosecutors as being one of the key driving forces behind their illegal acts, which on occasion has spilt over into murder.
No filmmaker wants something they poured all of their creative energies into to become known for harrowing crimes that make the blood run cold, but it’s happened an alarming number of times. More concerningly, it isn’t restricted solely to the horror genre, either.
For various reasons, the following ten movies have found themselves tied to some disturbing murders, even though, in many cases, the titles in question have become so entrenched in cinema history for their positive merits that the deaths they unwillingly ended up becoming part of have failed to overshadow their standing.
10 movies blamed for real-life murders:
10. Halloween (Rob Zombie, 2007)
Rob Zombie’s remake of the John Carpenter classic was inferior in every imaginable way, but the 2007 version of Halloween gained notoriety years after its release after being named in a confession.
Jake Evans shot and killed his mother and sister in their home at the age of only 17 years old in 2012, and explicitly named Zombie’s reinvention of the horror classic as one of the reasons behind the shocking crime, namely the opening scene that sees a young Michael Myers kill his school bully, older sister, her boyfriend, and his mother’s partner.
“While watching it I was amazed at how at ease the boy was during the murders,” he wrote. “And how little remorse he had afterwards.” Evans ended up calling the police and turning himself in, where he was sentenced to 45 years in prison. In his confession, he also admitted of Halloween that he “threw it in the trashcan so that people wouldn’t think it influenced me in any way,” before ultimately conceding its impact.
9. A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)
A horrific crime spree that echoed another figurehead of 1980s slasher cinema, Daniel Gonzalez stabbed a woman to death while wearing a Jason Voorhees-style hockey mask, before murdering three more people and confessing he wanted to be just like Freddy Krueger.
Gonzalez gained himself the moniker of the ‘Freddy Krueger Killer’ as a result of his crimes, which extended into stabbing a man to death and murdering an elderly couple after breaking into their home, things made all the more horrific by the fact he seemed to show no remorse.
He told police he’d always wondered “what it would be like just to be maybe Freddy Krueger or something like that, for one day,” chillingly describing his actions as “orgasmic” prior to being denied an insanity plea and given six life sentences.
8. Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)
Famed author John Grisham sought legal action against Oliver Stone and the producers of Natural Born Killers after it was named as the inspiration behind a murder, with the writer a friend of one of the victims.
William Savage was shot twice in the head by Benjamin Darras, who, alongside girlfriend Sarah Edmondson embarked on a cross-country crime spree that carried more than a few troubling echoes of the Quentin Tarantino-penned thriller.
Darras kept part of Savage’s bloodstained clothes as a trophy before Edmondson shot Patsy Clerk days later in a completely different state. She survived but was rendered quadriplegic by her injuries, with Grisham blasting Stone and suggesting filmmakers should be held accountable if their works inspire such heinous crimes.
During their trial, Edmondson testified that she’d been taking psychedelic drugs and watching Natural Born Killers multiple times before their violent road trip. She ended up serving 12 years of a 30-year sentence on charges of second-degree murder, armed robbery, and use of a firearm during a violent felony before being released in 2010.
7. London After Midnight (Tod Browning, 1927)
Helmed by influential Dracula and Freaks director Tod Browning, London After Midnight is one of the most famous lost films in cinema history, with the only known surviving copy perishing in a fire at MGM headquarters in 1965.
If it wasn’t for the horror-tinged mystery thriller being forever lost to the sands of time, then its lasting legacy would more than likely have been its status as one of the first motion pictures to ever be explicitly named as part of the case in a murder trial.
The year after London After Midnight‘s release, Robert Williams killed a woman with a straight razor, and told the authorities he was pushed towards committing the crime after being haunted by visions of star Lon Chaney’s maniacal, grinning face. “He threatened and shouted at me that he had me where he wanted me,” he said of the actor’s character, and following a retrial in 1929, he was deemed not guilty by way of being declared insane.
6. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)
Drew Barrymore’s iconic contribution to the opening scene of Wes Craven’s Scream set out a stall where the self-reflective slasher was set to break new ground, but it also created some unsavoury after-effects.
In 1998, Gina Castillo was stabbed to death by her own son and nephew with an assortment of knives and screwdrivers, only for additional investigating to reveal that one of them was also devising plans to kill a classmate for no other reason than she resembled Barrymore’s, Casey Becker.
More than a decade later, Thierry Jaradin murdered Alisson Cambier while dressed in full Ghostface attire, which barely even scratches the surface of the copycat crimes attributed to Scream in one way or another. It’s an unwanted footnote to a seminal moment in horror cinema.
5. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)
It was Stanley Kubrick who made the decision to withdraw A Clockwork Orange from being screened or distributed in the United Kingdom in 1973, with the filmmaker left shocked by a pair of high-profile crimes that were directly attributed to the film.
The previous year, a 14-year-old boy stabbed one of their schoolmates to death when dressed as a Droog, while another teenager pled guilty to the murder of an older homeless man after deciding that after hearing about A Clockwork Orange from friends, he fancied “the beating up of an old boy like this one.”
The prosecution in the latter case told the court that the link between A Clockwork Orange and the crime were “established beyond reasonable doubt,” with protesters gathering outside Kubrick’s home during the trial. It ultimately convinced him it was better not to be seen by anyone under any circumstances.
4. Child’s Play 2 (John Lafia, 1990)
The worst mass killing committed by a single perpetrator in Australian history, Martin Bryant gunned down 35 people ranging in age from three to 72 years old, with killer doll Chucky being heavily implicated in a tragedy that instigated sweeping changes to the country’s gun laws.
According to his ex-girlfriend, “He loved Chucky and used to go on about it all the time.” Not only that, but he would regularly quote the character by repeatedly saying, “Don’t fuck with Chuck.” He became obsessed with the film that revolves around a dungaree-clad killer who “just goes around killing all of these people,” with the Port Arthur massacre happening six years after the release of Child’s Play 2.
With a history of troubling behaviour and limited mental capacity, Chucky was never acknowledged either in court or by Bryant during his trial as a direct influence behind his disturbing shooting spree, but his admiration for the cursed object nonetheless became known the world over.
3. RoboCop 2 (Irvin Kershner, 1990)
Nathaniel White killed six people in the early 1990s, and he had no issues stating in no uncertain terms that the sci-fi action sequel RoboCop 2 was his point of inspiration for the first.
Confessing to investigators that “the first girl I killed was from a RoboCop movie,” he murdered pregnant Julie Frank by doing “exactly what I saw in the movie,” before leaving the body abandoned on the side of the railroad tracks in Middleton, New York.
The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner’s sequel was a huge step down in quality from Paul Verhoeven’s original, but forever being tarred with the brush of being named by a serial killer as the main influence behind the demise of their first victim is a much more disturbing legacy.
2. Queen of the Damned (Michael Rymer, 2002)
Already enshrined in history through tragedy as the final feature film appearance of Aaliyah after she was killed at the age of just 22 years old in a plane crash following the end of production, Queen of the Damned would go on to gather even more notoriety.
Allan Menzies said in court that he’d watched the horror film over 100 times, and claimed he was regularly visited by visions of Akasha, the vampiric monarch played on-screen by Aaliyah. According to him, he’d been promised immortality if he were to offer her a sacrifice.
Distressingly, he believed that “if you don’t murder somebody you couldn’t become a vampire,” leading him to stab friend Thomas McKendrick on 42 occasions after assaulting him with a hammer, drinking his blood, and disposing of the body in a makeshift grave.
1. The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999)
The Wachowski siblings’ revolutionary sci-fi flick has ended up becoming implicated in so many crimes that the ‘Matrix defence’ is accepted legal terminology, with defendants claiming they weren’t responsible for their crimes because they believed the world they existed in was a simulation.
Vadim Mieseges murdered his landlord in 2000 and informed the police he’d been “sucked into the Matrix,” while in a concerning coincidence, Tonda Lynn Ansley would also kill the person who owned her rented accommodation three years later because she was convinced she was part of a brainwashing conspiracy similar to the one orchestrated by the machines.
DC sniper Lee Malvo – who left 17 people dead – told a psychiatrist he’d seen The Matrix in excess of 100 times, shouted “free yourself from the Matrix” from the confines of his prison cell, and told the FBI they’d need to watch the movie if they ever wanted to have a chance of understanding him.
