21 Fictional Characters Blamed For Real Life Crimes

16. Edward Cullen

In 2010 Aaron Homer and his girlfriend Amanda Williamson attacked a homeless man Robert Maley, who they had allowed to stay with them in exchange for sucking his blood. Maley decided he'd had enough of the arrangement and refused to be a donor any more, which enraged Homer enough to attack and stab Maley. When the story broke and it was seen to involve a "vampire" couple, news outlets were swift to start pointing the finger at popular Vamp franchise Twilight, and its TV counterpart True Blood, which was due in some part to the rise in reports of teenagers sucking each other's blood. Bizarrely this put a comparatively tame horror-related tale like Twilight under the same scrutiny as films like Natural Born Killers.

15. Freddy Krueger

The case of Donald Gonzalez, a young Sussex man who went on a knife rampage - killing four people and injuring two others - is another stark example of the authorities being alerted to a potentially dangerous paranoid-schizophrenic, but failing to prevent his illness having tragic consequences. Unsurprisingly the media-reporting of his crimes focussed upon Gonzalez' desire to emulate Freddy Krueger, again arguably using the fiction angle to give the story added interest. Several months before the murders, Gonzalez had declared himself a danger and asked to be locked up. In the days preceding he had ran naked into the streets leaving knives strewn about his kitchen. Considering this, there was probably far more validity in questioning the mental health authorities implication in the crimes, rather than a horror movie bogeyman.