If you pay close attention to when I publish my blog posts, you will know that they come out on the first of every month. This one is a day before that. Call it a Halloween special.

If you pay really close attention, you will also know that this is the time of year I post about the Austin Film Festival. But this is the first time in about five straight years that I didn’t make it to the festival. Maybe a new streak will start again next year.

A good portion of films shown at the Austin Film Festival are horror movies, or as the Festival calls them, “Dark Matters.” I am not a horror movie fan and am less so the older I get. But, in honor of Halloween, I am devoting this post to that genre of films.

But first a true story. Call it a ghost story.

Many years ago, a friend of mine bought a new home in the Dallas area. It was a very old home, but new to her. After she moved in, strange things started to happen. There were cold spots in the house where the temperature was noticeably colder than the rest of the house. A check by an HVAC expert revealed nothing wrong with her system. But then, inanimate objects (her things!) began to be moved. My friend never saw them being moved, but often items she placed in one room began showing up in different rooms. My friend concluded she was either going mad or her house was haunted.

We had a mutual friend who had some experience with paranormal activity, and my friend asked her for advice. This mutual friend assured us that older houses are often “haunted,” but she shouldn’t be concerned as, unlike in the movies, these spirits do not mean to harm anyone. We investigated the history of the prior ownership of the house and discovered that a Mr. Hurlbut lived there for many years until his death. Our mutual friend surmised that Mr. Hurlbut was probably still there and the source of the haunting.

What should or could my friend do about Mr. Hurlbut? Our paranormal activity expert told my friend that the next time she felt a cold spot, heard noises she couldn’t identify, or found things moved, she should forcefully tell Mr. Hurlbut out loud that he no longer owned this house, that she was the new owner, and that it was time for him to leave. That is exactly what she did, and she never experienced any moved objects or other unexplained phenomena again.

I still don’t know if I believe all that, but my friend swears it’s all true. Stories like that of my friend have spawned horror movies—about twenty percent of all movies made. Here are just a few of the movies based on or inspired by actual events:

The Exorcist

Rotten Tomatoes rates The Exorcist as the scariest movie of all time. The true story behind the film involved a 14-year-old boy rather than a girl. The boy began reciting Latin phrases despite never learning the language. Something or someone carved letters into his abdomen that spelled “HELL.” The exorcism lasted 35 days, and the priest reported that the boy’s bed shook and moved across the room. For the full story of the story behind the film, you might want to check out a documentary about it, The Exorcism of Roland Doe.[i] Here is its trailer:

Scream

A real serial killer, Danny Rolling, inspired the makers of Scream. Rolling became known as the Gainesville Ripper. Police charged him with the grizzly murders of eight young women—all stabbed repeatedly. Rolling’s defense? “The devil made me do it.” Okay, maybe not the devil, but a demon who called himself Gemini. In a bizarre documentary, Scream: The True Story,[ii] two paranormal experts try to determine if Rolling’s defense was valid: he was possessed by the devil or some other demon. Here is the trailer for this documentary:

Personally, I found the portion of the documentary where the paranormal experts try to make contact with the demon a bit silly. Still, the background on the serial killer was interesting.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho

One of the creators of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre studied the case of Houston serial killer Dean Corll, who was believed to have killed 27 people, many with body parts cut off with what appeared to be a chainsaw. Corll’s accomplice led police to a storage unit where bodies were found. Another killer, Ed Gein, confessed to killing two women in Wisconsin and making furniture using their skin and was the inspiration behind Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, Psycho.

The Amityville Horror    

In December 1975, a family moved into a five-bedroom home in the Amityville area of Long Island, New York. They thought they had gotten a steal. And they had, but there was a reason behind it: Ronald DeFeo had killed six members of his family in the house the year before. The new owners abandoned the house a month later because of too many paranormal experiences. They heard strange voices. One member of the family claimed she was lifted off her feet.

The Lighthouse

The 2019 movie The Lighthouse is based on what is known as the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy. In 1801, two men, Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith, were hired to work at a lighthouse on Smalls Island off the coast of Wales. Griffith died suddenly of an illness. But because of the remoteness of the area, Howell had to keep Griffith’s body in his living quarters until the next shift arrived. But storms delayed their arrival, and Howell was stuck with Griffith’s decaying body for four months, during which time Howell slowly went insane.

As the old saying goes, truth is often stranger than fiction—and scarier.

Rotten Tomatoes rates the following as the ten scariest horror movies ever made:

1. The Exorcist.
2. Hereditary.
3. The Conjuring.
4. The Shining.
5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
6. The Ring.
7. Halloween.
8. Insidious.
9. Sinister.
10. It.

Horror movies account for about ten percent of all movie tickets sold, but that percentage goes way up the younger the moviegoer. Thirty-four percent of horror movie audiences are between 18 and 24 years old. Surprisingly (at least to me), women make up 58 percent of horror movie audiences.

Horror movies are big moneymakers. The Exorcist, for example, is the highest-grossing horror movie of all time when adjusted for inflation, earning $1.04 billion. Horror films have an average budget of $19 million, lower than most other genres, but have an average profit margin of 486 percent. Paranormal Activity has the highest return on investment for any horror movie, earning 19,758 times its budget. That’s an excellent return on investment!

So, why are we, especially younger people, attracted to horror movies? According to psychologist Angela Duckworth,[iii] at least part of the answer might be “sensation seeking,” or as psychologist, Paul Rozin calls it, “benign masochism,” or doing something that you really shouldn’t do because of the negative emotions they create, such as fear, pain, disgust, or sadness. But we do them anyway because of the thrill we get from doing them.

The scariest movie I have ever seen is number 6 on Rotton Tomatoes’ list—The Ring.[iv] In it, a journalist investigates a mysterious videotape in which anyone who watches it will die seven days later. Here is a scene from the film:

Admittedly, I couldn’t bring myself to watch The Ring Two.

Happy Halloween!

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[i] The Exorcism of Roland Doe:

• Production Company: 1895 Films
• Director: Tom Jennings
• Screenwriters:  Laura Verklan
• Starring: Anthony D. Call, Vincent Lampert, and Jeff Ballenger
• Release Date: February 5, 2021

[ii] Scream: The True Story:

• Production Company: Campfire
• Starring: Jackie Green, Theresa Croft, and Olivia Hytha
• Release Date: January 14, 2022

[iii] Please check out Angela Duckworth’s podcast on this subject at No Stupid Questions podcast, Episode 126, October 3, 2024.

[iv] The Ring:

• Production Companies: Dreamworks Pictures, Parkes/McDonald Image Nation, and Benderspink
• Director: Gore Verbinski
• Screenwriters:  Ehren Kruger, Koji Suzuki, and Hiroshi Takahashi
• Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, and Brian Cox
• Release Date: October 18, 2002