10 Best Horror Movies Based On Real True Crime Events

True crime has always been prevalent, and, with the expansive history of serial killers, missing persons reports, and mass suicides, there is a lot of horror in the real world outside of movies. But, because of this, many horror movies are based on real and horrifying events.

The element that makes “based on a true story” horror movies even more terrifying for the viewer is the idea that it could happen to them. They could be the next victim in the cannibal’s spree or the next person to go missing unexpectedly. There is a strange surrealness to true crime retellings, which is why true crime media is so popular. The real world is terrifying enough, but, when you combine it with a horror movie, it becomes so much more. Here are 10 horror movies based on real true crime events and people.

10 Silence Of The Lambs

Silence of the Lambs features a notorious killer, Buffalo Bill. A mass serial killer who abducts women to steal their skin from them for a nightmarish skin suit that he is crafting. Buffalo Bill is based on a number of serial killers, most notably Ed Gein, also known as the Butcher of Plainfield.

Ed Gein was a mass murder who abducted women, skinned them, and used their remains to craft household items and a full face mask. Buffalo Bill does this to his victims and has a number of homemade items from his victims. There is also a scene based on a popular Ted Bundy tactic. Bundy went around with a cast on his arm, asking for help from girls to load his trunk since he clearly was “injuring.” Once the girls would feel sorry for him and help, he would toss them into his trunk, very much alive. Bill does this exact maneuver with Catherine when he abducts her.

9 Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Like Buffalo Bill, Leatherface is also loosely based on Ed Gein. Leatherface is deformed and therefore resorts to stealing pieces of his victims’ faces for his own iconic mask. In the later films, other items, such as aprons, were also made out of human skin. Leatherface and his family are known to be cannibals, a trait that had also been based on Gein’s long list of crimes, and, though Leatherface kills men and women, the film focuses mostly on a final girl.

8 Psycho

Ed Gein really impacted the world of horror movies. Alfred Hitchcock’s Pyscho is another film loosely based on Ed Gein and his crimes. Although the original Norman Bates was imagined by author Robert Bloch as Gein was in action, Bloch got the likeliness of the serial killers near identical. One of Gein’s many crimes was grave robbery and necrophilia.

Bates had stolen his mother’s corpse and became her whenever he wanted to kill, using her as the excuse. Gein’s mother was extremely religious and isolated the boy from the outside, much like Norman’s mother in Psycho.

7 The Lighthouse

2019’s The Lighthouse is loosely based on a mysterious missing person case at the Flannel Isles Lighthouse. In the actual story, three men went missing, Thomas Marshall, Donald McArthur, and James Ducat. The men left nothing before and had seemed to just vanish until one of the lightkeeper’s logs were found.

In it, the keep spoke of a horrible storm that was blasting the island and other strange and mad phenomena, much like that in the film. However, there had been no reported storms at the lighthouse when the men supposedly had gone missing. What happened to the three of them still is unclear, many believe they got swept away by a storm, other’s believe something supernatural occurred there. While The Lighthouse is a bizarre film, the real story may be just as weird.

6 Scream

Scream is a notorious slasher flick with Ghostface as its leading killer. The self-aware film from the 90s is actually based on a real killer. The Gainsville Ripper, Danny Rolling, had murdered a number of people, mostly students, in Gainsville, Flordia. This, mixed with Kevin Williamson’s—the writer for Scream—love for horror movies, created one of the biggest slashers in the genre.

Along with Ghostface being loosely based on The Gainsville Ripper, the film and its sequel had induced a number of copycat crimes in the following years.

5 The Strangers

The Strangers is a truly haunting movie. It follows a couple who is staying in a house kind of in the middle of nowhere. No one is really around, except them. At least that’s what they believed. A young girl, hidden by the shadows on the front porch, comes knocking on the door asking “is Tamara home?”

After that, the couple begins to be surrounded by people wearing masks, trying to break into the home. No reason is given as to why they planned this attack or why they focused on this couple, which almost makes it even more eerie. The break-in and brutality is based on the Manson Family killings of Sharon Tate and company.

4 The Girl Next Door

The Girl Next Door and its remake are both based on the real case of a teenage girl named Sylvia Likens being brutally murdered by her neighbors in Indiana, 1965. The film, An American Crime, with Ellen Page, is also about this case.

Basically, Sylvia and her sister stayed with caretaker, Gertrude Baniszewki, who encouraged her seven children and the kids from the neighborhood to violently and horribly abuse and assault Sylvia to death. In The Girl Next Door, the main character is named Megan, and she lives with her aunt Ruth. The story is utterly tragic and horrifying.

3 The Amityville Horror

While The Amityville Horror is notoriously a supernatural film, filled with demonic possessions, ghosts, and so much more, the story also has a true-crime element. The story is based on a real crime and haunting in Amityville, New York that the real Ed And Loreinna Warren of The Conjuring fame helped with.

Before the Lutz family ever moved in, in 1974, Ronald J. “Butch” DeFeo Jr. murdered his parents and four siblings with a rifle. Though he has changed his story a number of times, he claimed he heard voices in his head telling him to kill them all.

2 The Sacrament

The Sacrament was a documentary-like horror film where a crew infiltrates a community cult to record and see what happens in day to day life for them. Things start out normal but drastically shift as the film goes on.

The movie is based heavily on the events that transpired at the Jonestown Massacre. The massacre took place in 1978, over 900 people drank spiked grape-flavored Flavor Aid, result in a mass-suicide.

1 From Hell

From Hell is the story of an inspector searching for the notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper. The real case of Jack the Ripper has a lot of mystery surrounding it, no one even knows if there was only one killer or who it could have been. Some think it could have been someone within the police force or had a friend within who was able to cover it up so easily. From Hell isn’t historically accurate, but it’s as a good a theory as people could speculate.

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