Her favorite horror movie was a much scarier true story

We are in the spooky season. Halloween costume shops have taken over vacant buildings; “Monster Mash” is on our playlists; And best of all: horror films are waiting to be seen.

When we scare ourselves with scary movies, we calm ourselves down with the reminder: It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real.

Some of the most popular films in the genre are based, to varying degrees of accuracy, on true events. In many cases, the true story is even scarier than the Hollywood portrayal.

“The Exorcist” (1973)

Green mush vomit and ’70s makeup production is a little less frightening than it was in 1973, when audience members fainted during a screening of The Exorcist. But the story behind the making of the film is just as horrifying.

In 1949, a Washington, D.C. area couple noticed their 14-year-old son was acting strangely. Robbie, a pseudonym used in reporting, recited Latin phrases despite never learning the language and had strange engravings on his body; His bed and other objects around him shook or moved inexplicably, wrote the Washington Post.

Believing Robbie was possessed by a demon, the family traveled to St. Louis and sought help from Jesuit pastors at St. Louis University. One of them, Rev. William Bowdern, performed a 35-day exorcism that was widely reported by news organizations.

Unlike the film, which won two Oscars, there was no head-scratching or hovering, said Henry Ansgar Kelly, a professor at UCLA who interviewed Bowdern in 1960. In the film it was a young girl instead of a boy and Washington instead of St. Louis.

But there were some similarities: The priests involved said they saw Robbie’s bed shaking and moving around the room.

Bowdern also told Kelly that he saw scratch marks on Robbie’s chest that spelled “HELL.”

Interviews with people involved in Robbie’s exorcism formed the basis for the book and film. When “The Exorcist” was filming on the Georgetown University campus, there were so many accidents on set — a carpenter lost several fingers and the set mysteriously caught fire — that a Jesuit priest had to bless it several times.

“Devil’s Pass” (2013)

In 1959, a group of nine people were found dead under mysterious circumstances weeks after setting off for a hike in the Russian Urals.

A search and rescue team found their bodies hundreds of meters from their tent – ​​”some barefoot and almost naked” – in an area later named Dyatlov Pass after the force’s leader, Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old engineering student. reported the New York Times.

Unexplained radiation was found on some clothing items. One woman was missing her tongue and others suffered blunt force injuries.

“Why would nine very experienced hikers leave a perfectly good, inadequately clothed tent in subzero temperatures and walk a mile to certain death?” said Donnie Eichar, author of “Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident.”

In the film “Devil’s Pass,” the answer is that the hikers came across a secret bunker where the Russian government was testing teleportation technology.

The reality remains complicated: Russian officials said the deaths were due to an avalanche. Eichar suspected that it was a swirling wind movement called Karman vortex streets.

“It’s the middle of the night. They were sleeping. They were inadequately dressed,” Eichar said. “It was a fight or flight situation.”

However, since there are no surviving witnesses, questions may remain unanswered.

“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974)

The film, considered a seminal for the slasher genre, features disturbing scenes such as a man cutting people open with a chainsaw and a victim being stabbed with a meat hook.

Kim Henkel, one of its creators, told Texas Monthly in 2004 that he had investigated the cases of Elmer Wayne Henley, a 17-year-old accomplice of Houston serial killer Dean Corll, 33, and another killer, Ed Gein to develop the film.

Henley, Corll’s accomplice and believed to have killed at least 27 people, fatally shot Corll in 1973 and then led police to a storage shed where bodies were found. He also confessed to his own involvement in some murders and is serving a life sentence.

“That kind of moral schizophrenia is what I tried to build into the characters,” he told Texas Monthly.

Gein, who, among other disturbing events, confessed to killing two women in Wisconsin in the 1950s and making furniture out of human skin, was also the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

“The Amityville Horror” (1979)

When the Lutz family moved into a beautiful five-bedroom home with a swimming pool in the Amityville area of ​​Long Island in December 1975, the price of $80,000 seemed like a bargain.

“It was a dream come true,” George Lutz told ABC News in 2002.

But the family later learned the reason for the incredible price: Ronald DeFeo had killed six members of his family in this house the year before.

Four weeks after the Lutz family moved in, they “left the house” after having too many paranormal experiences, according to “The Amityville Horror,” a 1977 book by Jay Anson about the family’s time in the house . Strange voices filled the house, and Lutz’s wife was said to have been swept off her feet.

The book and the subsequent film adaptations were not entirely accurate, Lutz later said. He even sued the producers of the 2005 film for defamation.

“The Lighthouse” (2019)

Watch Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson descend into madness while tending to a lighthouse on a mysterious island.

The film was based on an event known as the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy.

In 1801, Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith were hired to look after the lighthouse on Smalls Island, a tiny boulder about 18 miles off the west coast of Wales, Julian Whitewright, a maritime archaeologist in Wales, said in an interview.

However, according to Stephen Liddell, a tour guide and historian, Griffith died suddenly of illness. In such a remote area, Howell had to keep Griffith’s body in his living quarters until the next shift of lighthouse keepers could arrive.

But storms delayed reinforcements, and Howell was stuck alone with Griffith’s decaying body, slowly slipping into madness. Howell eventually attached it to the railing on the outside of the lighthouse, where it remained for four months until help finally arrived, Liddell said.

Director Robert Eggers’ version of the story, The Lighthouse, required creative freedom and was more of a psychological, slow-paced thriller.