21 Fictional Characters Blamed For Real Life Crimes

6. Travis Bickle

In 1981 John Hinckley junior acted upon his obsession with Jodie Foster by attempting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. Hinckley said he had committed the crime in order to impress Foster, and was said to have taken his inspiration from Travis Bickle's plot to assassinate a presidential hopeful, in her breakthrough film Taxi Driver. Before settling on the assassination idea Hinckley had conceived of other ludicrous plans to impress the actress including: committing suicide in front of her and hijacking a plane. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which caused an uproar in the US, though trying to impress somebody by murdering the president doesn't exactly suggest his mental faculties were fully intact. It also suggests that the problem didn't lie with Taxi Driver but rather in Hinckley's obvious mental illness.

5. Neo

One of the first details latched onto by the press in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre was that the killers: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wore trench coats and had taken to calling themselves the "Trenchcoat Mafia". As such their appearance was noted as being strikingly similar to the look of Neo in The Matrix. The film had been on general release for 20 days prior to the massacre taking place but there is no evidence that the killers had seen the film, let alone that it was the trigger for such drastic and horrifying inspiration. This tenuous link became synonymous with the reporting of the event. This again put the spotlight on the effect of violence in films and despite having no basis in fact, the association between the film and Columbine was given credence by being repeatedly referenced, and to an extent even endures today.