10 Movies That Influenced Audiences In Awful Ways

When Natural Born Killers released in 1994, Variety called it "the most hallucinatory and anarchic picture made at a major Hollywood studio in the last 20 years". Much more has been written about this divisive film in the years since, from those who thought Mickey and Mallory's journey was violence for the sake of violence to others who found the imagery almost hypnotic.

It's likely that Ben Darras and Sarah Edmondson fall into that latter camp. They spent the night of March 5 1995 watching the film over and over while dropping acid. The next morning, they set off for a drive where they came across Bill Savage, a cotton mill manager in Mississippi. With a .38 caliber revolver, they shot him twice in the head then continued their drive all the way to Louisiana. There, they shot Patsy Byers, a clerk at a convenience store, leaving her paralysed.

Bill Savage had a famous friend in the crime writer John Grisham, who was understandably a little upset that his friend was murdered. He reached out to Byers in 1996, advising her that her lawsuit against the teens who'd shot her could be extended to add both Time Warner and Oliver Stone for their role in the film, citing product liability. In January 1997 the case was dismissed, and Byers immediately appealed. Although the case was reinstated in May 1998, Byers had died of cancer later in 1997. Finally, in June 2002, all appeals ended and the case was closed.

Sarah Edmondson was released on parole after serving only 12 years of a 30 year sentence. Ben Darras remains imprisoned.

This is only one of several cases related to the film. The most famous has to be the Columbine school shooting, where the shooters used the code NBK in their messages as they planned the attack.