10 Movies That Influenced Audiences In Awful Ways

10. Interview With The Vampire Led To Real Life Vampirism

When wholesome love story Twilight showed a horny 109-year-old man watching a 17-year-old girl sleep in her bedroom, nobody spared a thought for the more sinister problems that vampire movies bring with them. Like every other cult vampire film before it, Twilight led to a rise in vampire roleplay with schools reporting that students were swapping blood because:

"They have your blood inside of them and you have their blood and so you're closer to each other,"

While there is a likelihood that certain conditions like hepatitis could be passed that way, and a major concern problem with people being marked as property, this was still nothing compared to the effect 1994's Interview With The Vampire had on Daniel Sterling. Already a highly suggestible manic-depressive, Sterling was described as being obsessed with the movie when he saw it, almost to the point of mesmerism.

When Lisa Stellwagen, his girlfriend of eight years, decided to leave him he saw only one logical way to keep her with him. In November 1994, after telling Lisa "I want to kill you and drink your blood. Tonight you are going to die," Sterling grabbed a serrated knife and drove it into her flesh a total of nine times as she lay in bed. He then spent what Lisa describes as "several minutes" drinking her blood before she convinced him to get her some help, telling him that he'd go to prison if she died.

“I was influenced by the movie," Sterling said, from the cell he ended up in anyway, "I enjoyed the movie, but I cannot sit here and blame the movie.”