5 Horror movies based on real-life events: ‘The Conjuring’, ‘The Exorcist,’ and more

The scariest horror films are not the ones with the most elaborate monsters or the most expensive special effects. They are the ones that end with the words based on a true story, because nothing the imagination can conjure is quite as disturbing as knowing that something like this actually happened to real people in the real world. Here are five horror films rooted in events that were genuinely, terrifyingly real.

According to The Providence Journal, the film is based on the real-life experiences of Roger and Carolyn Perron, who moved into a farmhouse on Round Top Road in Rhode Island in 1971 and reported a series of paranormal activities that eventually drew paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren to their door. Directed by James Wan and starring Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, the film builds its dread with a patience and craft that makes every scare feel genuinely earned. The story was later documented in detail by the Perrons’ oldest daughter, Andrea, who was old enough to remember everything.

According to NBC News, on November 13, 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed his entire family in their home at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, before claiming he had heard voices telling him to do it. A year later, George and Kathleen Lutz moved in with their three children and reported such severe paranormal activity that they fled the house in the middle of the night after just one month. James Brolin and Margot Kidder lead the cast in a film built on a story that has never been fully explained or entirely dismissed.

According to All That’s Interesting, the real Annabelle is not a porcelain doll but a Raggedy Ann, summoned to the attention of Ed and Lorraine Warren by two young women who believed a benevolent child spirit had inhabited it, only for the Warrens to conclude that the entity inside was actively searching for a human host. An exorcism was performed and the doll was moved to the Warrens’ occult museum in Connecticut, where it remains locked away to this day. Directed by John R. Leonetti, the film takes that deeply strange real story and builds a sustained, suffocating atmosphere of dread around it.

Inspired by a documented 1949 exorcism performed on a young boy in Maryland, a case recorded in detail by the priests involved and never satisfactorily explained, the film follows a young girl whose sudden and violent transformation leads her mother to exhaust every medical explanation before turning to the church. Directed by William Friedkin and starring Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, and Max von Sydow, it remains one of the most genuinely disturbing films to date. The seriousness with which the cast and crew approached the material gives it a weight that most horror films never achieve.

According to People, screenwriter Kevin Williamson conceived the idea for ‘Scream’ after catching wind of the horrific Gainesville Murders of August 1990, in which Danny Rolling, dubbed the Gainesville Ripper, targeted college students in a killing spree that became a nationwide sensation. The film follows a teenage girl being stalked by a mysterious killer in a small town, directed by Wes Craven and starring Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette. It went on to become one of the most influential horror films ever made.