10 Scariest Scenes In "True Story" Films

Reality has never been Hollywood's strong suit.

One only need look at the hundreds of pages of IMDb goofs, historical inaccuracies, lawsuits and listicles on this very site to see that cinema has never had a good handle on facts. And nor should it: artistic license should be encouraged when necessary to emphasize or more finely tune a film's central thesis.

That said, there's a long line of films that claim to be "based on true story" as though such claims heighten the intensity. Some films even like to playfully brag about their authenticity with warning phrases such as, "Unbelievably, based on a true story," or "unfortunately...", but few actually contain the kernels of fact that ground them to our real world.

At best, they'll play off a true story's main hook: Pain and Gain's murder plot was notable primarily for how incompetent its criminals were, but also because it was the first murder solved due to a serial tag number on breast implants.

So malleable is Hollywood's relationship with fact that The Coen Bros. Fargo, purportedly based in truth according to a jokey introductory text, sent people searching for their real-life counterparts.

But occasionally, whatever true hook the film uses to reel in its audience is immaterial when the horrors play out onscreen. Here are some of the scariest, regardless of whether they happened.

We've spoken at length about Wes Craven's seminal 1995 horror film that helped give new blood to the long-dormant slasher genre, but Kevin Williamson didn't only draw on his love of film for the script.

The screenplay is notoriously cinema-obsessed, casually referencing most of the major films of its genre within the opening scene and peppering in more obscure references as the film progresses. It's part of what makes Scream's legacy so endearing, ingratiating cinephiles early in their obsession with cult references that serve as a gateway to less mainstream works that inspired it.

As for Williamson's killers though, he largely drew from one source: while previous movie killers had drawn inspiration from Ed Gein, he opted for a less publicized tabloid. Danny Rolling had killed eight people, five in the course of four days during a spree as the Gainesville Ripper in 1990.

What struck Williamson most, and what made the film as effective as it was, was Rolling's predilection for staging the bodies in particularly gruesome fashion, ensuring maximum shock value upon discovery. This, along with some visual cues taken from the opening of Dario Argento's Suspiria, served as the basis for Drew Barrymore's corpse to be gutted and strung up so graphically.

Furthermore, like the Scream killers, Rolling offered absolutely no motive for his actions.