12 Movies That Pretended To Be Based On True Stories

There have been more than a few movies inspired by the macabre deeds of Wisconsin serial killer and grave robber Ed Gein, including Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps the most notorious, however, is Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which opens with the words, "The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths," and featured claims that it was "based on a true incident" on VHS covers.

How closely do the events of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre mirror the particulars in the case of Ed Gein? Not very, according to Snopes. For one thing, it didn't take place in Texas, there weren't any chainsaws, and Gein may have been more ghoul than killer, though he did confess to being responsible for the demise of at least two women. What they did have in common, according to Gunnar Hansen, the actor who played Leatherface, was "the skin masks, the furniture made from bones, the possibility of cannibalism. But that's all. The story itself is entirely made up."

"This is a true story." They're the first words we see at the beginning of Fargo, an affectation that has been picked up and repeated by every season of the hit series that has spun off from the film. Here's the thing, though: It really isn't. 

"We wanted to make a movie just in the genre of a true story movie," Ethan Coen told HuffPost. "You don't have to have a true story to make a true story movie." That doesn't mean there's nothing real behind the movie, though. The Coen Brothers also revealed that certain events in the film were inspired by true stories - specifically, a GM salesperson who did, in fact, defraud the company by tampering with serial numbers, and a homicide case that gave rise to the film's infamous wood chipper scene. The latter, inspired by the sad fate of Helle Crafts, actually took place in Connecticut.

In an ironic case of life imitating art imitating life, the movie Fargo is rumored to have contributed to the demise of Takako Konishi, a woman who perished near Detroit Lakes, MI, in 2001. When she was found in a snowy field, her last intelligible word was "Fargo," which led some people to conclude that she had taken the film's "true-story" conceit literally and was looking for the suitcase of cash buried by Steve Buscemi's character. In fact, this interpretation of her story became the inspiration for the 2014 film Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter.

Of all the various horror movies that have claimed to be based on a true story over the years, perhaps no other film is as famously wrapped up in its real-world bonafides as The Amityville Horror. Adapted from the book of the same name by Jay Anson - which adds "A True Story" right onto its title - The Amityville Horror seems to find its way onto cinema screens in one form or another every few years, including a recent appearance in the opening moments of The Conjuring 2, which similarly purports to be based on actual events.

So is The Amityville Horror - maybe the most famous "true" horror story of them all - actually true? The verdict at Snopes doesn't beat around the bush - it offers a great big, boldface "False" next to a red stop sign. How did such a famous story turn out to be a hoax? Well, it started with a bit of real horror, as Ronald DeFeo Jr. took the lives of six members of his family in what would become the infamous "Amityville house" in Long Island.

Anson's book is supposedly drawn from the experiences of the Lutzes, the family that moved into the house following the grisly crime. According to them, they experienced all sorts of demonic activity in the home - just about everything you see on-screen and then some, from swarms of insects to gigantic faces peering in windows. And plenty of "experts" later verified their reports, including Ed and Lorraine Warren, the protagonists of the Conjuring franchise.

The problem is that Ronald DeFeo Jr.'s lawyer later admitted to making up the whole thing along with the Lutzes, hoping to get fame and fortune and a new trial for DeFeo.

The casting notice for The Blair Witch Project warns, in all caps, that these will be "EXTREMELY CHALLENGING ROLES," which will be filmed under "very difficult conditions." This is because filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick had hit upon the idea of hiring unknown actors and sending them out into the Maryland woods to essentially improv a horror movie. Today, this background is almost as legendary as the film itself. For those of us who saw The Blair Witch Project in theaters back in 1999, we may remember its viral marketing campaign, which posited it as a true story - an actual document left behind by student filmmakers who had disappeared.

While there's no actual Blair Witch legend - either in the (real) town of Burkittsville, MD, or anyplace else - that doesn't mean the story behind The Blair Witch Project was quite conjured from whole cloth. The filmmakers took partial inspiration from the real legend of the Bell Witch, which dates back to the 1800s in Tennessee. The Bell Witch - who we would describe as more like a ghost or poltergeist today - afflicted the Bell family and was observed by historical figures including Andrew Jackson. It also inspired other films, including 2005's An American Haunting, which starred Donald Sutherland, Sissy Spacek, James D'Arcy, and Rachel Hurd-Wood.

The trailer for Hidalgo bills it as "the incredible true story of a man who went halfway around the world to find himself." The jingoistic tale of Frank T. Hopkins (played by Viggo Mortensen in the film) and his horse Hidalgo - legends who, according to the trailer, have "never lost a long distance race" - may indeed be incredible... but is it true?

Well, there was certainly a man named Frank T. Hopkins, and he wrote memoirs in which he claimed to have done many of the things that happen in the film. That includes win the 3,000-mile race across the deserts of the Middle East known as the Ocean of Fire, which serves as the film's centerpiece. So, if you take those memoirs at face value, then that "true-story" claim seems legit.

Not everyone is willing to just take Hopkins's word for it, however. In fact, several historians have pointed out numerous inconsistencies in Hopkins's tale. For instance, there is no record of Hopkins ever working for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show even once - let alone for 30 seasons, including the trip to Paris where he claims to have been invited to race in the Ocean of Fire. On that subject, there also doesn't seem to be any indication anywhere that such a race ever existed, let alone happening annually for more than 1,000 years, as Hopkins claimed in his memoirs.

It's been called "one of the most unsettling movies ever," and it helped cement the status of the home invasion subgenre - but was The Strangers actually based on a true story? The advertising would certainly have you believe it was, with the words "inspired by true events" included in the teaser trailer and plastered on many of the film's promotional materials. And plenty of people think so, too, with a few of the top YouTube comments on the film's trailer saying things like, "I can't imagine people that went [through] this in real life" and "Home invasion movies like this are terrifying because they're not far-fetched at all."

Here's the thing, though: That "true event" The Strangers is based on? It's a whole lot less scary than the resulting film. "As a kid," filmmaker Bryan Bertino recalled in the picture's production notes, "I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere. One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it. At the door were some people asking for somebody that didn't live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses."

It's not any fun to be burglarized when you're not home, but it's a big improvement over what Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman go through in The Strangers. That's not to say there aren't some real events that could have factored into a movie like this. One YouTube commenter claims the film was inspired by a quadruple homicide at Keddie, CA, in 1981 - a horrifying real-life story, but not one that appears to have any documented connection to The Strangers.