HORROR MOVIES BASED ON TRUTH? on QuizRevolution

Screenwriter and novelist Peter Benchley was inspired in part by a series of shark attacks that plagued the New Jersey shore in 1916. Over a 12-day period in July of that year, five people were attacked, four of whom died. A seven-foot-long great white shark was killed on July 14, and its stomach was found to contain human remains. To this day, there is a debate over whether or not that shark was the culprit -- some scientists argue that it was probably a bull shark -- but no further attacks were reported that summer after it was killed.

In 1974, paranormal researchers Kerry Gaynor and Barry Taff investigated the case of a woman believed to be named Doris Bither. Bither lived in Culver City, California and claimed to have been physically and sexually assaulted by an entity. Gaynor and Taff witnessed objects move in her house, captured photos of floating lights and saw a humanoid apparition, but they never saw it assault the woman and never tried to capture it. Gaynor stated that the attacks diminished when Moran moved.

The story is based on Gustave, a 20-foot-long crocodile living in Burundi that is believed to be the largest crocodile on record on the African continent. It is rumored to have killed 300 people, although that number is almost certainly inflated. High-profile attempts to capture Gustave have failed, and the creature, believed to be over 65 years old, still lives in the Ruzizi River area of Burundi.

In January 1998, married couple Tom and Eileen Lonergan disappeared off Australia’s Great Barrier Reef after a diving company accidentally left them behind in the water. It took two days -- when a bag containing a wallet and passports was found -- for the crew to realize that they'd left the couple behind. A search was conducted, but their bodies were never found. Belongings discovered weeks later showed no signs of the violent shark attack that the film suggests.

Frank De Felitta was inspired to write the novel -- and later the movie script -- after he heard his six-year-old son, Raymond, who'd never taken piano lessons, playing music perfectly on the family piano. De Felitta consulted a Los Angeles occultist, who called Raymond's talent as an "incarnation leak," explaining that the boy had lived many lifetimes. The incident led to the author's personal belief in reincarnation.

Greg McLean originally wrote the script as fiction, but upon learning of two real-life Australian killers who attacked travellers, he edited the story to reflect the real cases –- namely, Bradley John Murdoch, who killed a British tourist and tried to abduct another in July 2001, and Ivan Milat, who picked up hitchhikers and took them into the woods to torture and kill them during the '90s. Both Murdoch and Milat were captured and sentenced to life in prison.

William Peter Blatty, screenwriter and author of the novel The Exorcist, was inspired by an article he read in college at Georgetown University about an exorcism performed on a 13-year-old boy in Mount Rainier, Maryland in 1949. The story's details have been muddled through the years -- perhaps intentionally so, in order to protect the family -- but the boy's actual home lay in Cottage City, Maryland, and the exorcism was performed in St. Louis. Evidence points to the boy's behavior not being nearly as outrageous or supernatural as was portrayed in the film.

The character Norman Bates was inspired by Ed Gein, a Wisconsin man who was arrested in 1957 for committing two murders and digging up the corpses of countless other women who reminded him of his dead mother. He skinned the bodies to make lamp shades, socks and a "woman suit" in hopes of becoming a woman. He was found to be insane and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.