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

4. Wolf Creek

The film: A cult classic, this Australian serial killer film is a taut, fast spaced and effective little chiller. Three backpackers - two British tourists and their Aussie mate - travel across the Outback, dropping by the Wolf Creek National Park to check out a giant crater formed by a 50,000-ton meteorite. Which turns out to be a huge mistake, since upon returning to their truck they realise their watches have all suddenly broken and the car won't start. An eccentric guy called Mick Taylor suddenly appears and offers to lend a hand, and apparently they don't have the Stranger Danger lessons on the other side of the world, because these dumbasses take him up on it. Because, obviously, he drugs them and then drags them to his shed in the middle of nowhere, where he proceeds to kill them in the classic style of a horror film. Only Ben, the Aussie, survives, and the film ends with a bunch of text about how he was arrested but eventually cleared, and the real killer was never found. The true story: Which is a bit of weird ending for a film that was previously just a flat-out, fairly standard horror movie (albeit in a refreshingly different setting and with a terrifying new villain), and came about because the film is sort of based on a true story. Again, this sounds like the sort of thing a friend would tell you and dismiss as made up, but it actually happened - well, in fact it's two different stories that were fused together, which actually just makes it all the scarier in our eyes. Greg McLean originally wrote the script as fiction, but upon stumbling across two real-life hitch hiker murderers, he decided to blend a little bit of reality in their too. Bradley John Murdoch killed a British tourist and tried to abduct another in July 2001, and Ivan Milat picked up backpackers and took them into the woods to torture and kill them during the nineties; at least these stories had happier endings, since both killers were captured and given life sentences.