8 Fictional Movie Villains Inspired By Real People

7. Kevin Wendell Crumb (Split) - Billy Milligan

Kevin Wendell Crumb Split Billy Milligan
Universal Pictures/Blake23 (via WikiMedia Commons)

In M. Night Shyamalan's Split, Kevin Wendell Crumb is a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder (aka multiple personality disorder), resulting in his body harbouring the essences of 24 completely different people.

The character is inherently complex, but because DID is a real-life condition, Shyamalan was able to look to people who have it, to help him get a sense of how to accurately portray Kevin.

One of the director's primary influences was a man named Billy Milligan. Milligan, like Kevin, had 24 distinct personalities all living inside his body, including 10 "desirables", 13 "undesirables", and The Teacher, a fusion of all the other personalities.

Milligan was also the first person in history to be acquitted of a crime - raping three women - who suffered from DID. Milligan pleaded insanity, claiming that two of his other personalities carried out the crimes, and he was sentenced to time in a mental hospital.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!