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

10. The Mothman Prophecies

The film: Richard Gere stars in this slightly shonky guilty pleasure as as John Klein, a newspaper columnist who travels to Point Pleasant, West Virginia to research the local legend of the Mothman for a story. After losing his wife in a car crash Klein finds a bunch of weird drawings which she did before she carked it, and ends up noticing a parallel between these spooky doodles and the urban legend of the Mothman, a man-sized bird...creature...something who had been sighted by multiple people in the town back in the sixties. Despite its goofy premise the film does a good job of never fully comitting to whether the creature itself is real or not, playing instead on the psychology of the grieving Klein and the way that rumours spread through small communities, making for an effectively spooky (if not fantastic) little chiller. The true story: And, yes, it's a true story! Sort of. The Mothman Prophecies is based on the non-fiction book of the same name by by parapsychologist and Fortean author John Keel. The real-life journalist didn't have nearly as tragic a personal life as Richard Gere fictionalised version in the movie, but he did really go to West Virginia to look into actual reports of a Mothman. From 15 November 1966 to 15 December 1967 there was a good half-dozen sightings of the alleged monster - five gravediggers saw "a man-like figure fly low from the trees over their heads", two separate couples reported a "large flying man with ten-foot wings" and red eyes, and even a couple of firemen corroborated these descriptions. The sightings ended with the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge that same year, which killed 46 people. Something people reckon the Mothman might have had something to do with...