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

3. The Hills Have Eyes

The film: Back when Wes Craven was still making actual horror films instead of ironic commentaries on horror films (and also good horror films, so like the late seventies/early eighties) who put out this low-budget gem which still haunts the minds of grindhouse cinema audiences across the world. A family road trip takes a bit of a nasty turn when the holidaymakers in question wind up stranded in the middle of the Nevada desert and fall prey to a clan of deformed cannibals in the surrounding hills. Hence the name! It's sort of implied that the reason this bunch of man-eating monsters look so weird is something to do with nuclear tests in the desert, but that doesn't get dwelled on so much as the horrendous violence and gore which kicks into high gear just as soon as the cannibals have availed the family of their car and started clattering them over the heads with tyre irons. The true story: Okay, so we'll admit off the bat that their aren't any cannibals deformed by radiation living in the Nevada desert stalking innocent people. We hope. In fact Craven's original script for The Hills Have Eyes hewed a lot closer to its source material, as the appearance of the family was going to be put down to incestuous inbreeding rather than nuclear tests. That's because the writer/director took inspiration from the legend of Sawney Bean, a Scottish folk tale about a guy in the fifteenth or sixteenth century who lived in a cave on the coast with his wife and had fourteen children. Oh, yeah, and they used to abduct and eat passers by. It gets even creepier when it turns out that the "legend" is an actual thing that happened, and the family were rumbled when body parts started washing up on the beach and they were hunted down. By the time they went to trial there were 48 family members living in the caves, the majority of them the product of inbreeding, all of whom were executed for the murder of over a thousand innocent people between them.