10 Disturbing True Stories Behind Famous Movies
2. A 33-Year-Old Woman Posed As A 13-Year-Old Boy - Orphan
2009's cult classic horror film Orphan chronicles a family which adopts a 9-year-old Russian girl, Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), from an orphanage, who soon enough begins violently acting out.
Orphan's big twist is that Esther isn't actually a little girl at all - she's a 33-year-old Estonian woman suffering from a hormonal disorder which stunts her growth. She's been posing as a girl for most of her life and has a habit of, uh, murdering her new families.
This mind-melting reveal might seem too ridiculous to be believable, and yet it is rooted in some semblance of reality, as it's based on the shocking 2007 case of Barbora Skrlová.
Skrlová was a 33-year-old Czech woman also suffering from a growth disorder, and who had participated in child abuse in her adoptive family. When the authorities were finally alerted to this, she fled.
Skrlová moved to Norway and assumed the identity of a missing 13-year-old boy named Adam, binding her breasts and shaving her head to more convincingly pass as a boy. But after four months of hiding, Skrlová was eventually caught.
Though Esther didn't go to the lengths of posing as a boy, she did similarly have to bind her breasts to convincingly resemble a young girl, as was seemingly directly inspired by Skrlová's own methods.
The next time anyone tells you that Orphan is just too damn silly, send them one of the many news articles written about Barbora Skrlová.