10 Horror Films You Won't Believe Were Based On True Stories

2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Psycho

The films: They seem pretty dissimilar, besides all the murders that happen in them. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho is the 1960 blockbuster (blochbuster?) that basically invented the slasher genre single handedly, but is told in Hitch's usual cinematically daring fashion and thus tends to be much more universally adored than, say, Prom Night. It's shot in classy black and white, stars big name actors and is generally a confirmed movie classic. Tobe Hooper's low budget, grimy Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a tough going horror flick of the seventies school, with lots of nasty stuff and no familiar faces. Yet both were incredibly controversial upon their release, and probably had similar budgets, owing to the amount of perceived violence on screen in both; except both films actually tend to cut away from any actual gore, letting you fill in the blanks. So really it's your brain that's showing all this nasty gratuitous stuff, you monster. The true story: With the other big similarity being that they're both loosely based off the same real life story. Robert Bloch's novel Psycho, on which the film is based, and the murderous family from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre each take inspiration from the crimes of Wisconsin murderer and grave robber Ed Gein; Psycho took the killer's deceased domineering mother whom he often dressed up as, while the Hooper's film took his propensity to skin his victims and wear their body parts like bits of clothing (as the fetching mask that Leatherface, the head of the Texan chainsaw murderers, is made of) and also, allegedly, used their bones and other organs to make furniture, lampshades and the like. That said, neither film is an exact adaptation of Ed Gein's murders - they're in the wrong settings, for one, and take some liberties with the characters involved and their family situations - but just knowing that parts of two of the scariest horror films are based on true urban legends? That's enough to keep us from leaving the house for a week.