15 Horror Movies That Inspired Real-Life Crimes

1. Child’s Play

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Universal

From the first film released in 1988 to the recently released Cult of Chucky, the Child’s Play franchise is now seven films strong. Though the premise is kind of ridiculous – a serial killer’s soul gets trapped in a kid’s doll – and the franchise descended into self-parody in its later films, Child’s Play and its antagonist Chucky are said to have played a part in no less than five brutal crimes.

Three of those crimes took place in the UK beginning with the murder of 16-year-old Suzanne Capper in 1992 whose captors tortured her while playing the rave song ‘Hi, I’m Chucki (Wanna Play?’ which featured samples from the movie in the days leading up to her death.

Most notoriously, Child’s Play 3 was suggested as the inspiration behind the horrific murder of toddler James Bulger at the hands of 10-year-old Robert Thompson and Jon Venables in 1993 while in 2009 a similarly shocking crime took place in Doncaster when two young brothers aged 10 and 11 were charged with the attempted murder of two other young boys. They’d reportedly been allowed to watch Child’s Play alongside other horror films.

Martin Bryant, the man responsible for the deaths of 35 people in 1996 during Australia’s Port Arthur massacre, was reportedly a big fan of Child’s Play 2 and more recently in 2015 a Russian woman named Elena Lobacheva took to murdering homeless people on the streets of Moscow with co-conspirator Paul Voitov after taking inspiration from her favourite movie Bride of Chucky.

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