15 Horror Movies That Inspired Real-Life Crimes

Interview with the Vampire isn’t the only Anne Rice adaptation to have supposedly motivated a real-life murder. In 2002, 22-year-old Scotsman Allan Menzies – a diehard fan of Queen of the Damned who’d reportedly watched the movie hundreds of times – brutally murdered his best friend Thomas McKendrick.

Menzies claimed he’d been ‘visited’ by a vampire queen from the movie called Akasha who coaxed him into killing someone with the reward of being turned into a vampire and given immortality. When McKendrick made a disparaging remark about Queen of the Damned, Menzies snapped and stabbed him 42 times after which he drank some of his victim’s blood and ate part of his skull before burying him in a shallow grave.

At his trial, Menzies tried to plead diminished responsibility but was eventually convicted of murder and jailed for life though ended up committing suicide in his cell in 2004.