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

8. Hard Candy

The film: This effective, controversial and queasy little thriller stars Ellen Page as Hayley Stark, a young girl groomed by Patrick Wilson's internet pervert Jeff Kohlver in a chat room, eventually coaxed into visiting his house so they can get down to some statutory To Catch A Predator nastiness. To Kohlver's surprise the tables are turned not long after she arrives at his home; she makes him some drinks and has a crack about young girls being warned not to drink something that they didn't mix themselves, getting Wilson's character to down more and more booze...which it turns out the 14-year-old has drugged herself. When he comes to, Hayley has him bound to a chair and the rest of the film sees her brutally torturing him, both physically and psychologically, with the piece de resistance that she's castrated him and popped his crown jewels in the toaster. This, by the way, is all being directed by David Slade, whose most recent film was Eclipse. The third Twilight film. Suffice to say his early career was a little different from the sparkly vampire stuff. The true story: All of which sounds like a classic urban legend, really. A young girl in trouble, a big twist, a contemporary issue which kids would probably have a natural fear of, making it natural campfire fodder? Funnily enough, this is another of those urban legends that just so happens to be true. Sort of. The film started life thanks to a news story producer David W Higgins saw on US magazine show 20/20, about Japanese schoolgirls who were luring rich businessmen into honey traps, only to then were beat and rob them. So not quite the same plot as the table-turning child predator story of Hard Candy, but you can see the germ of the idea in there - "What if the person you expect to be the predator is not who you expect it to be?" Higgins said of the original idea. "What if it's the other person?" - and there's enough parallels for us to name it a true story.