The Real Story Behind 10 "Based On A True Story" Horror Films

2. The Quiet Ones

The pitch: Reborn as a home for "smart, sophisticated horror" and trying to move away from their camp reputation of the past, the new Hammer Films were inevitably attracted to the "based on a true story" element of this 2014 psychological horror. Jared Harris features as the Oxford academic whose experiments on the alledgedly possessed Olivia Cooke are reputedly based on real scientific attempts to understand the supernatural. The real story: The casting of the old fashioned intellectual, former Professor Moriarty and the Oxford setting give the experiments in the film a veneer of the respectability of the academic establishment (even after Harris' Professor Coupland has to withdraw the experiment off campus). In truth, however, the 1972 Philip Experiment that inspired the film was rather more on the fringes of respectable academia. In the early 1970s a group of Toronto based researchers loosely affiliated with the university and led by poltergeist expert Dr. A.R.G. Owen attempted to create a ghost named Philip. They created an elaborate tragic backstory for the ghost and sought to focus their collective minds on it to a point where the imaginary ghost would physically manifest itself. Obviously a very loose adaptation, The Quiet Ones mainly takes simply the idea that physical paranormal activity can occur through psychological suggestion, rather than the rest of the real experiment. The results were predictably less spectacular than the film too. There were no physical manifestations, but in video taped seances "Philip" apparently responded by rapping on the table. What makes this "scientific experiment" seance any different from any traditional fake seance with a fraudulent medium tapping against the table is up for debate.