10 "True Story" Horror Movies That Tricked You Into Believing Them
3. The Strangers
Seeing something like The Strangers offering itself up as based on a true story is a bone chilling experience, since the fear of aimless violence and systematic home invasion is enough to set anyone's teeth on edge. Understandably, it's particularly easy to believe The Strangers when it tells us it's real since things like this can and do happen every day. Its basis in the tangible is what made audiences blindly follow where the true story lead.
But in reality, no such horrific stalking story ever took place. The closest the story gets to telling the truth is director Bryan Bertino's inspiration being drawn from a similar experience:
“As a kid, 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 who didn’t live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors on the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses.”
It's close enough to the titulars strangers' own 'because you were home' modus operandi I guess, but still a world away from murdering vacationing couples in cold blood.