Horror Films, Hoaxes, and "True Events"

What do Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, The Blair Witch Project, and Wolf Creek all have in common? True, they are all horror films, to an extent—Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its atmosphere of pagan dread and psychological uncertainty, transcends the genre more than the other examples I listed, but can still be classified as horror. What they also have in common, however, is the “fact” that they are all based on true events, a belief often encouraged by the films or filmmakers themselves. Except—the true events that inspired all of these films are either maddeningly difficult to pin down or turn out to be nonexistent.

Many types of films use historical incidents or real people as a basis for their plots—courtroom dramas, war movies, biopics, the inspiring-teachers-in-rough-schools genre—but few of these genres make the supposed links to real events so integral to the experience as many horror films do. Sure, A Beautiful Mind ran into some controversy a few years back when it turned out that Akiva Goldman and Ron Howard streamlined John Nash’s life to make it more accessible, but to people who embraced the movie, did it really matter to them? The experience of watching the film was probably not changed in a significant way, nor did moviegoers feel cheated later. The controversy was academic.

Horror films, though, often don’t exist in a vacuum for the people who love them. Few things are as immediate as a maniac with a knife jumping out of a closet in a slasher flick, but for the examples I named at the beginning of this essay, the horror is of a deeper sort, a probing into the true nature of the world around us, and the disquiet these films can produce lingers on long after the film is no longer playing. Simply as works of complete fiction, these films are unsettling, but they seemed to resonate more in the culture at large when it was believed that they reflected specific incidents that literally happened. I’m not sure why this is, unless fear is an emotion that is enhanced by a connection to reality, whereas with joy or sadness or desire it isn’t necessarily so. Can you imagine The Blair Witch Project becoming the phenomenon it did if it hadn’t been for the website and faux TV specials that led many in the initial audiences to believe it was a documentary? The Amityville Horror is not a good film using any aesthetic criteria, but it built on the notoriety of Jay Anson’s novel—a book introduced as being an investigation of a true haunting—and became a movie popular enough to spawn several sequels and a remake.

The Blair Witch Project apparently has no mooring to reality at all, as it turns out. Wolf Creek is probably loosely based on a string of slayings of backpackers in Australia, but nothing like what happens in the movie was ever even hinted at. The Exorcist is also loosely based (a phrase that can mean almost anything) on a real event, a 1949 exorcism of a fourteen-year old that took place in the basement of a St. Louis Catholic hospital, but William Peter Blatty’s source novel clearly states that it a fictionalization of the real case.

The Amityville Horror has a more interesting story, as the house with the window eyes depicted on the book’s cover does exist in Amityville, New York, on Long Island, and a horrific murder did occur there, in which a mentally-ill 23-year old named Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his family. Turns out though that Anson probably cooked up a scheme with the new owners of the house to fabricate a haunting, which they did with wild success. Even though the whole story has been exposed as a hoax for decades, the story still has a hold on people—websites and researchers still debate the background of the novel. A friend of mine, who came of age in the seventies, told me the story of going to the house with his brother and girlfriend—she was apparently psychic and wouldn’t approach the house, feeling that it had an evil presence, and his brother went onto the property anyway, immediately twisting and breaking his ankle on level ground. Don’t try convincing my friend that the house isn’t everything the book and film claim it to be.

Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock is another fascinating case. Based too on a source novel—Joan Lindsey’s 1967 book of the same name—Picnic at Hanging Rock opens with a textual note that informs the viewer when and where the events occurred. This use of contextual information at the beginning of the film is something the film shares with The Blair Witch Project and Wolf Creek, and it seems to play an important part in conditioning the audience to shift its expectations. Lindsey’s novel never pushes the idea that it is historically grounded, but from the moment the film came out, people have assumed it must be true. Over the years until her death in the eighties, Lindsey always played coy, never confirming nor denying her story, but research has never turned up even one piece of evidence suggesting a group of private-school girls disappeared at Hanging Rock. So why the assumptions of a factual basis? Perhaps the tone of the film is so sober, so measured when examining the hysteria surrounding the disappearances that the film seems devoid of skill—no “tricks” of moviemaking were utilized. In reality the film is artfully crafted, but Weir is so restrained that his movie, like The Blair Witch Project, seems more, well, “truthful”—a type of horror cinema verité.