New York City: the home of gritty, groundbreaking, independent film. Unlike Los Angeles, New York offers filmmakers more artistic freedom with their work. Here, they are not bound by the pressure from major Hollywood studios; and while budgets may be lower, the results of financial restraints are often rewarding. Many hip, young directors draw inspiration from this exhilarating, fast-paced city and use it as the backdrop for some of the most nightmarish and anxiety-inducing films ever made.

10 Nightmares Lurking Just Behind History

10 Requiem For A Dream

This 2000 psychological drama from director Darrren Aronofsky doesn’t hold back in its portrayal of the devastating consequences of addiction. Featuring standout performances from Jennifer Conelley, Jared Leto, Ellen Burnstyn, and Marlon Wayans, this modern day fable follows four addicts living on Coney Island whose lives spiral out of control as they will stop at nothing to get their fix. This film is an examination of just how strong a hold drugs and other stimuli have on those who fall prey to their allure.

The late, great Roger Ebert described Aronofsky’s ability to portray the various mental states of his addicts as “fascinating.” Of the movie’s “worthless” NC-17 rating he said, “Anyone under 17 who is thinking of experimenting with drugs might want to see this movie, which pays like a travelogue of hell.”^[1]

9 Rosemary’s Baby

Groundbreaking for its time, this 1968 psychological horror film written and directed by Roman Polanski is a haunting chronicle of a woman’s pregnancy. Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes) are a young couple who have just moved into their first apartment in New York City. Before long, Rosemary becomes pregnant. Alone and confined to their apartment, she becomes increasingly skeptical of an elderly couple living next door. As Rosemary’s paranoia grows, she becomes convinced that they are part of an evil cult that wants to take away her baby and use it for their rituals.

Polanski’s screenplay was based on Ira Levin’s 1967 novel of the same name. In 1980, a “quiet, pensive, and insecure” Levin said of his childhood horror inspirations, “I don’t recall being scared at all. Now, I’m terrified,” according to a Vanity Fair article calling Rosemary’s Baby “the most cursed hit movie ever made.”^[2]

8 The Devil’s Advocate

Keanu Reeves stars as Kevin Lomax in this supernatural thriller/horror film from 1997, directed by Taylor Hackford. Kevin is a defense lawyer living in Florida with his wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron). The couple relocate to New York City after Kevin is offered a high-paying job at a law firm, led by the charismatic John Milton (Al Pacino).

While Kevin is swept up with work and indulges in the many perks of the job, Mary Ann starts to experience frightening visions and begins to unravel. As his wife’s mental health deteriorates, Kevin realizes that his boss may, in fact, be satan, himself.

Fun Fact: Donald Trump’s private apartment at Trump Tower–featuring gold decor and a view of Central Park–was used as the home of Kevin’s client, Alex Cullen (Craig T. Nelson).^[3]

7 Fatal Attraction

Adrian Lyne’s iconic 1987 thriller is a tale of love, lust, and obsession. Dan (Michael Douglas) is a happily married Manhattan lawyer, living and working in New York City while raising a daughter with his wife Beth (Anne Archer). Everything changes when Dan meets Alex (Glenn Close), an editor for a publishing company. The two have a casual weekend affair while Dan’s wife and daughter are out of town. Alex, however, wants more than just a fling and manipulates Dan into spending more time with her.

When his family returns, Dan stops spending time with Alex, who has become obsessed with him. Dan makes it clear that he does not wish to continue the affair, but Alex refuses to accept that. She becomes increasingly aggressive and begins to stalk him and harass his family. As her behavior escalates, Dan realizes that his top priority is no longer to try and hide the affair but to protect his family whose safety is now at risk.

Producer Sherry Lansing wanted Barbara Hershey for the role of Alex, but Hershey was unavailable. Also on Lansing’s wishlist were Melanie Griffith, Jessica Lange, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Debra Winger.^[4]

6 Dressed To Kill

This 1980 neo-noir slasher film was written and directed by Brian De Palma. New York City prostitute Liz (Nancy Allen) witnesses the brutal murder of housewife Kate (Angie Dickinson). While the police suspect Liz to be the murderer, the true killer seeks to kill Liz, as she is the only witness to the crime. Kate’s son is the only one who believes Liz, and the two of them team up to uncover the truth about his mother’s murder.

Making the film in the city was “pretty terrific” for De Palma, who’s from New York. “It’s so amazing to shoot all over the city and in different places. Of course, they did the interior of the museum in Philadelphia, but the film was shot in New York, so that was really cool.”^[5]

10 People Who Survived Your Worst Nightmares

5 American Psycho

Christian Bale is Patrick Bateman in this 2000 black comedy psychological horror film co-written and directed by Mary Harron. A handsome, young New York City investment banker by day, Patrick’s life revolves around maintaining his appearance and social status and striving endlessly to be the most respected among his coworkers. By night, however, Patrick indulges in his sinister desire to torture, kill, and sometimes even consume any helpless victim who may be unfortunate enough to cross his path.

What starts out as the portrait of the day-to-day life of a narcissistic serial killer turns out to be a psychological whirlwind as reality begins to blur, and Patrick attempts to cover up his tracks that may or may not have even been left behind in the first place.

Because the studio thought Bale might not be famous enough to play Bateman, there was a moment where it looked like American Psycho would become an Oliver Stone film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. But activist Gloria Steinem reportedly steered DiCaprio away from the project to protect his Titanic appeal among young female fans. In a weird turn of events, Steinem married David Bale five months after the release of American Psycho and became Bale’s stepmother!^[6]

4 Eyes Wide Shut

1999’s Eyes Wide Shut was the last film ever made by Stanley Kubric, one of the most renowned directors in cinematic history. This erotic mystery psychological thriller tells the story of upperclass New York City couple Bill (Tom Cruise) and Alice (Nicole Kidman) Hartford. Bill is a medical doctor, and Alice is a stay-at-home mom to their daughter. One night, after smoking some weed, Alice tells Bill that she once had sexual fantasies about a man that were so strong, she would have abandoned their family.

This revelation sparks something in Bill, who had previously claimed to have never been the jealous type. Bill is tormented by this information, obsessively visualizing the scenario in his head. He embarks on a late-night adventure through New York City where he attends a masked party of a secret society. The next day, after returning to his normal life, he discovers that a woman whom he met at the party has been found dead.

“Life goes on,” one character says cynically. “It always does until it doesn’t.” Kubrick died four days after completing the film.^[7]

3 Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky’s iconic psychological horror film from 2010 is a nonstop roller coaster ride that never lets up. Every aspect of this film showcases impeccable writing, filmmaking, and performances across the board. Natalie Portman stars as Nina Sayers, a dancer at a New York City ballet company who still lives at home with her overbearing mother, played by Barbara Hershey. The innocent and naive Nina is elated when the company’s artistic director Tomas (Vincent Cassel) chooses her to play the highly coveted role of the Swan Queen in the company’s upcoming production of Swan Lake.

The role of the Swan Queen, however, requires the dancer to portray both the virginal White Swan, which Nina perfectly embodies, and the evil, sensual Black Swan, for which fellow dancer Lily (Mila Kunis) is more suitable. As a rivalry emerges between the dancers, the competition and pressure to not only keep her role but to give a perfect performance sends Nina on a downward spiral of self-destruction into madness.

Aronofsky had considered combining ballet into the plot of The Wrestler, making it the story of a love affair between a wrestler (the epitome of “low art”) and a ballerina (the epitome of “high art”). But the director realized that wrestling and ballet were too big for just one film.^[8]

2 Jacob’s Ladder

This 1990 psychological horror film was directed by Adrian Lyne. War veteran, Jacob (Tim Robbins), awakens in a New York City subway after returning home from Vietnam. He is now working as a postal clerk and living in brooklyn with his girlfriend.

Jacob is mourning his old life and the death of his child while simultaneously experiencing vivid flashbacks and hallucinations. His world starts to fall apart around him as people and things begin to morph into the most disturbing and horrific images.

Lyne considered several big stars to play the leading character. Richard Gere, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino were all interested in the role. Don Johnson and Mickey Rourke each turned it down.^[9]

1 Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro stars as Travis Bickle in this 1976 psychological drama, directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Shrader. Travis is a loner and insomniac who works nights as a New York City cab driver. After meeting a campaign worker named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), Travis hatches a plot to kill a presidential candidate. Narrowly escaping a campaign event, to which he brought a gun, Travis then turns his attention to a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster), whom he feels obligated to save.

Fun Fact: Since Foster was only 12 years old during filming, she was not permitted to participate in the most explicit scenes. Her old sister Connie, who was 19, agreed to be Jodie’s body double.^[10]

10 Real Places Straight Out Of A Nightmare

Horror and thriller films “have legs,” as they say in the Hollywood film industry, meaning that they have long-lasting appeal. Not surprisingly, the true stories on which many such movies are based also have legs, intriguing generations of moviegoers long after the actual crimes that inspired them have been solved.

These 10 cinematic chillers and thrillers based on horrific crimes are no exceptions. Like the movies they are based on, the crimes—chillers and thrillers in their own right—continue to horrify us as much today as when they were first committed.

Related: 10 Gruesome Crimes Fit For Horror Movies

10 A Place in the Sun

Directed by George Stevens and starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters, A Place in the Sun (1951) is based on the same horrendous crime that inspired author Theodore Dreiser to write his 1925 novel An American Tragedy: Chester Gillette’s 1906 murder of his girlfriend, Grace Brown.

Brown had moved to Cortland, New York, seeking the excitement and glamour for which she had longed as a child growing up on a dairy farm in New York’s Otselic Valley. In Cortland, she took a job at the Gillette Skirt Factory. There, she met the owner’s son, Chester. They began a secret romance, and, despite Gillette’s concern that Brown was not “suitable” to become a member of his family, he fathered a child by her. After she told him the news, perhaps hoping he would marry her, she returned to her parents’ home to have the baby.

Gillette asked her to accompany him to Big Moose Lake, located about 200 miles northeast of Cortland, in the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, a beautiful, serene setting perfect for boating.

A sign near the lake commemorates the occasion: “On July 11, 1906, Chester Gillette and Grace Brown left here for a boat trip….” He planned to propose! Brown thought. However, as the rest of the sign’s text reads, the boat trip ended “in her death and his 1908 execution for murder.”

The rented boat was not returned, and a search for the missing couple was launched. Finally, Brown’s body was found, along with the capsized boat. The victim’s killer had struck her with a tennis racket, and she’d fallen into the lake, where Gillette had drowned her. The news of her pregnancy had been unwelcome; he had not wanted to be a father, and he had not wanted to marry her.

After killing her, Gillette fled the scene, but he was arrested in a nearby hotel, where he was found hiding in a room. He insisted he did not know Brown, but the love letters he had exchanged with her, which prosecutors shared with the jury during Gillette’s 1908 trial, told a different story. Convicted, he was executed the same year at Auburn Prison.^[1]

9 Anatomy of a Murder

It is 1952. Allegedly, a rape has occurred, and the husband has murdered the suspected rapist. He is tried for murder in the first degree. The defense attorney attempts to get his client off, even though a “crowd” of witnesses observed the murder—a shooting—as it occurred in the Lumberjack Tavern in the unincorporated community of Big Bay, Michigan.

The 1958 novel Anatomy of a Murder by attorney John Voelker (writing as Robert Traver) recounts this thrilling crime and is the basis for the 1959 movie of the same title. It was directed by Otto Preminger and starred James Stewart and Lee Remick. Both the book and the film are based on an actual case: Voelker’s successful defense of Coleman Peterson.

Could Voelker’s defense have swayed juries today? That’s the question that former Army Judge Advocate Eugene Milhizer, author of Dissecting Anatomy of a Murder, investigates. How Coleman committed the dastardly deed left Voelker with little room to maneuver in his defense, Milhizer suggests, since it amounted to “a public execution.” However, Voelker was able to persuade the jury that Coleman should be acquitted based on his client’s having been seized by an “irresistible impulse” that had rendered the killer himself a victim of temporary insanity.

Such a defense might well fail today, Milhizer suspects. Times were different in the 1950s, he points out, when the public tended to look more favorably on the possibilities of rehabilitation and on criminals’ rights. The Model Penal Code, he says, was intended for states’ use when such attitudes were the norm. It also allowed the possibility of an acquittal on the grounds of “cognitive disability,” the inability to know right from wrong, or “volitional disability,” the inability to exercise self-control, despite knowing right from wrong.

After John Hinckley, Jr., was acquitted of attempting to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on the basis of insanity, Congress and the American public were incensed. Many states adopted the federal insanity statute that Milhizer says “not only [places] the burden on the defendant to prove he’s insane…but [also] removes… ‘irresistible impulse’ as a defense.” Nevertheless, Milhizer admires Voelker’s story, which he finds “compelling for all sorts of reasons.” ^[2]

8 The Honeymoon Killers

Janus Films calls The Honeymoon Killers (1969), directed by Leonard Kastle, “a stark portrayal of the desperate lengths to which a lonely heart will go to find true love,” not that the victims of Martha Beck, played by Shirley Stoler, and Raymond Fernandez, portrayed by Tony Lo Bianco, ever found true love in their encounters with these serial killers.

As Dirk C. Gibson points out in Serial Killing for Profit: Multiple Murder for Money, Beck and Fernandez are rare, if not unique, in one respect. Most serial killers use the same modus operandi every time they strike. Yet, Beck and Fernandez employed “a different MO for each crime,” which indicates that the couple’s murders were more or less unplanned, spontaneous events, the motive for which was always the same: financial gain. The murderers were not above killing even “a baby and two elderly women.”

Beck and Fernandez were an odd couple. “Despite baldness and questionable looks,” Fernandez was a ladies’ man, Gibson writes, and Beck was “larger than life literally and figuratively,” her weight having been estimated as between 200 and 300 pounds.

A “puny” boy, Fernandez had an unhappy childhood and tended to daydream. As an adult, in a 1945 accident aboard a ship, he suffered a head injury, which “changed his personality completely”; thereafter, he embarked on a career of crime. During a period of incarceration, he embraced voodoo, attributing his sway with women to his practice of the religion. Between crimes, his vocation was that of a gigolo.

Beck was born in Milton, Florida, and may have been “raped by her brother” when she was 13 years old, Gibson says. Large even as a child, due to a “glandular condition,” she was teased mercilessly by her peers to the extent that she “became a recluse.” Sexually mature at age 10, she was also sexually “obsessed” and enjoyed “bizarre sex.” She wed three men, having two children by Alfred Beck, before moving to California, where she met Fernandez through a lonely-hearts ad she placed. They became partners not only in romance but in murder as well.

Although there is no definitive tally of their murders, they are suspected of having killed between three and twenty victims.^[3]

7 Murder on the Orient Express

The 1974 movie Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Sidney Lumet, has an all-star cast, with Albert Finney as detective Hercule Poirot. It is based on the Agatha Christie bestselling 1934 detective novel by the same title. As The Home of Agatha Christie website points out, the novel, and, therefore, the movie, is based on “a real life crime,” that of Bruno Hauptmann, the kidnapper of Charles Lindberg, Jr., the famous aviator’s infant son who “was taken from his crib in the middle of the night.”

Christie, her official website explains, “rewrote this case for [her novel] Murder on the Orient Express when she crafted the subplot of the Armstrong kidnapping case.” Charles Jr. is replaced by Daisy Armstrong, whose mother succumbs to complications of her pregnancy after the girl’s remains are discovered, and “the devastated father kills himself.” As a result, “an innocent servant” who becomes a suspect in the father’s apparent murder commits suicide.

A close approximation of this subplot appears in the movie’s plot, with gangster Lanfranco Cassetti substituting for Hauptmann and Daisy again replacing Charles Jr. The Armstrongs are represented by Sonia, who dies in childbirth, and her husband Hamish, who afterward commits suicide. The couple’s French maid, Paulette, is the suspected servant.^[4]

6 Eaten Alive

Eaten Alive (1976), directed by Tobe Hooper and starring Neville Brand and Carolyn Jones, concerns Judd, a mad hotel owner in eastern Texas, who feeds his victims to his giant pet alligator, which inhabits a nearby swamp. The plot sounds unlikely, to say the least, which makes the fact that the movie is based on a true story even more astounding.

The movie’s story is inspired by tavern owner Joe Ball of Elmendorf, Texas, who, during the 1930s, kept five alligators in his backyard. Although he is known to have killed two women, Ball may have murdered more. According to reporter Rebecca Hawkes, his known victims include his waitress Minnie Gotthardt and “another of Ball’s women,” 22-year-old Hazel Brown, whose bodies he disposed of as pet food for his hungry reptiles, thereby earning himself the sobriquet “Alligator Man.” Between the meals of Ball’s human victims, Hawkes reports, his alligators enjoyed snacks, it is said, courtesy of his bar’s patrons, who tossed live dogs, cats, and other stray animals to the reptiles.

Then, someone reported an odd-smelling barrel behind a neighbor’s barn. Had Ball, for some reason, stored human remains inside the barrel instead of feeding them to his alligators? Perhaps he was storing them there temporarily until he could feed the hungry reptiles. In any case, local police took an interest in him. The tavern owner persuaded the lawmen to allow him one last drink before escorting him to jail. When they accommodated him, he seized the opportunity to retrieve a gun stashed near his cash register and shot himself in the heart. Ball’s handyman, Clifford Wheeler, then confessed to having aided and abetted Ball in committing the murders and admitted to helping him dispose of the women’s bodies.

These were the only two murders that could be proven against Ball, and it may well be that at least some of the others attributed to him resulted from the legendary status he acquired among the locals. As Hawkes suggests, “In a strange way, it’s almost as if people…want the rumours to be true. There’s something inherently horrific about the prospect of ‘being eaten’: it’s a deep-set, psychological fear, that taps into childhood tales of Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood.”^[5]

5 Looking for Mr. Goodbar

Intentionally or not, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a cautionary tale of sorts. Its plot is an implicit warning to young women who go looking for love in all the wrong places. In the 1977 movie, directed by Richard Brooks, Diane Keaton, playing Theresa Dunn, a young teacher in New York City, meets Richard Gere’s Tony in a bar. She takes him to her apartment, where he drugs her after taking cocaine with him. She then seeks other lovers, during and after Tony’s return, until, finally, she encounters Gary (Tom Berenger), a bisexual man who kills her in a fit of rage when, unable to have sex with her, he mistakenly assumes that she is questioning his masculinity.

The movie is based on the 1973 murder of an actual teacher, 28-year-old Roseanne Quinn, who was stabbed to death after making the fatal mistake of picking up prison escapee John Wayne Wilson in a bar and taking him home with her for a one-night stand. In her article about the crime, writer Cheryl Eddy spells out a possible theme for both the actual story and its fictional accounts, as presented in Judith Rossner’s best-selling 1975 novel and the movie based on it: “It seemed like hip, sexy fun, until the Quinn case gave a stark reminder of the dangers of letting strangers into your bedroom.”

When Quinn didn’t answer her telephone or show up for work for two days in a row, the school principal at which she taught dispatched a male teacher to her studio apartment, but Quinn did not answer his knock. The building’s superintendent unlocked her door. Inside, they found Quinn lying on her fold-out bed, dead from 18 stab wounds. According to an account of the crime, “a red candle had been thrust into her vagina, and a statue lay across her face.” Her killer had covered her corpse with a blue bathrobe.

Police canvassed the neighborhood, discovering that, at night, Quinn had frequented such local bars as the Copper Hatch and W. M. Tweed’s. While she was at Tweed’s, she had drunk with and talked to Charlie Smith, who was with another man, Geary Guest. Becoming bored, Guest left soon after the men had arrived at the bar. Smith stayed. He was visiting New York from Chicago, seeking work, he said. A regular customer who drew caricatures sketched two for Smith: a Mickey Mouse drawing and a picture of Donald Duck. Police found both caricatures at Quinn’s apartment.

Smith, who was actually Wilson, told Guest that he had stabbed Quinn to death after she insulted him when he had been too intoxicated to perform, and, after showering, dressing, and cleaning up the crime scene, he had left. Guest gave him some money, and Wilson went to Miami to see his pregnant wife before visiting his brother in Springfield, Illinois.

Police, meanwhile, released a sketch of a suspect, and Guest, seeing a resemblance to himself, called a lawyer, who advised him to notify the authorities. The Manhattan assistant district attorney agreed to give Guest immunity in exchange for his testimony against Wilson, who was subsequently arrested at his brother’s residence. Extradited to New York City, Wilson used sheets to hang himself while awaiting charges.^[6]

4 Badlands

Described by a Filmsite reviewer as a “remarkable and impressive,” if “alienating and disturbing,” independent film about “two estranged young fugitives who are mad lovers,” Badlands (1973), directed by Terrence Malick, stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis.

After Kit murders Holly’s father, the lovers fake their own deaths before setting up housekeeping in a treehouse that they construct in a remote location. Bounty hunters, would-be informants, and a couple who let the duo hide out at their house occasion additional murders until, tired of running, Holly surrenders to the police and is sentenced to probation. Captured, Kit is executed.

Malick’s plot is based on the 1958 killing spree committed by Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, whose 11 victims included Fugate’s mother, stepfather, and two-year-old sister. Fugate received a life sentence, but she was paroled after 18 years; Starkweather was electrocuted.^[7]

3 Double Indemnity & The Postman Always Rings Twice

Double Indemnity (1944), directed by Billy Wilder, stars Fred McMurray as insurance salesman Walter Neff, Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, and Tom Powers as their victim, Phyllis’s husband, Mr. Dietrichson.

By seducing Neff, Phyllis gets him to write her an insurance policy on her husband. The policy includes a double indemnity clause, paying double in the event that the insured’s death is accidental. Phyllis drives her husband to a train, and Neff, hidden in the back seat, murders him before boarding the train himself, jumping off, and dragging the dead man’s body onto the tracks.

However, the insurance company suspects either suicide or murder rather than accidental death and refuses to pay. Later, Phyllis, eavesdropping, overhears insurance adjuster Barton Keyes telling Neff that Phyllis and an accomplice are suspected of killing her husband for his insurance money. A double-cross ends with one of the partners in crime murdered by the other. The surviving partner, wounded, waits for the arrival of an ambulance—and the police.

In The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), directed by Tay Garnett, Cora Smith (Lana Turner) and Frank Chambers (John Garfield), the drifter who falls for her after they meet at the diner owned by her husband Nick (Cecil Kellaway), conspire to murder Nick and start over together as the new owners of Nick’s diner.

Several attempts to murder Nick fail before the killers are finally successful. However, they turn on one another when the district attorney investigates Nick’s death as suspicious, and Cora receives probation. Although they marry and have a child, their relationship remains problematic, and Frank kills Cora and their child in a car accident, for which, ironically, he is convicted of their murders and is executed.

Both Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice are based on 1943 novels by the same titles, both written by author James M. Cain. The novels, in turn, are based on the 1927 crime that Ruth Snyder and her lover, Judd Gray, committed: the murder of Snyder’s husband Albert for his life insurance.

After her murder conviction, Snyder predicted that she would never be executed: “This is just a formality,” she insisted. “I have just as good a chance now of going free as I had before the trial started.” Instead, as New York Times writer Janet Maslin declares, Snyder “actually wound up with her hair on fire when she was electrocuted at Sing Sing in 1928.”^[8]

2 Scream

Directed by Wes Craven, Scream (1996) stars Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, an intended victim who turns out to be her would-be killer’s killer. Skeet Ulrich, as Billy Loomis, and Matthew Lillard, as Stu Macher, play the murderers, who blame Sidney’s mother, Maureen (Lynn McRee), for having driven away Billy’s mother after she had had an affair with Billy’s father (C. W. Morgan).

Having already killed Maureen, the boys are now murdering their fellow high school students, planning to pin the killings on their hostage, Sidney’s father (Lawrence Hecht). More or less a device to causally link the slasher film’s series of murders together, the plot seems unlikely, to say the least. Still, the movie won four Saturn Awards and other accolades, earned $173 million at the box office, and launched a series of sequels.

A 1990 crime in Gainesville, Florida, inspired Scream. Danny Rolling bungled his attempt to kill his father, who routinely abused his mother, “succeeding only in taking the man’s eye and ear,” reports D. DeGroot, but his next attempt at murder succeeded entirely. This second crime inspired Scream and led to Rolling’s becoming known by the nickname “The Gainesville Ripper.”

During a four-day crime spree in Gainesville, DeGroot writes, Rolling “would stalk, stab and kill” four coeds and a male college student after invading their apartments while they slept and “stabbing them in their beds.” First, though, he would rape the female students; then, he would kill them. Next, he would mutilate them, staging his victims’ “severed heads and corpses…in lewd sexual positions for authorities to find.” When his DNA was matched to the crime scene, he was arrested and charged with multiple counts of murder.

Rolling made it easy for the authorities by confessing to the crimes. He wanted to be “famous like Ted Bundy,” DeGroot explains. He was convicted and sentenced to death, and, on October 25, 2006, he was executed by lethal injection in the Florida State Prison. There is a clear difference between Rolling’s brutal murders and those depicted in Scream, as DeGroot points out: “In the movie, the killers are out for revenge. In real life, Rolling’s crimes were random and a matter of accessibility.”^[9]

1 Alpha Dog

Alpha Dog (2006), directed by Nick Cassavetes, stars Emile Hirsch as drug dealer Johnny Truelove; Justin Timberlake as Johnny’s lieutenant, Frankie Ballenbacher; Anton Yelchin as Zack Mazursky; and Ben Foster as Jake Mazursky, Zack’s older brother. Johnny kidnaps Zack, whom he spots on the road after Zack has run away from home, planning to hold him until Jake pays an outstanding debt.

After a couple of Johnny’s associates dig a grave in a remote area in the mountains, one of them kills Zack, and they bury him. The remote grave is discovered, and the gang members involved in Zack’s kidnapping and murder are convicted of their crimes, receiving various sentences. Zack’s murderer, Elvis Schmidt (Shawn Hatosy), is sentenced to death.

According to NBC News, the true story behind Alpha Dog began in the West Hills section of Hollywood, California, among “million-dollar homes…swimming pools and tidy lawns.” After giving him repeated chances to reform, the parents of troubled Ben Markowitz finally told him to leave home. Not long after he did so, Markowitz became friends with Jesse James Hollywood, who resided nearby.

Dropping out of high school, Hollywood became a drug dealer, taking in enough money by age 19 to make “a big cash down payment” on a house of his own. His criminal associates were friends, and Hollywood made room for Markowitz. Despite their friendships, however, business always came first for Hollywood, and his crew were afraid of him—all of them, that is, except Markowitz, whom Hollywood himself feared. Markowitz had incurred a $1,200 debt with Hollywood, though, and the debt—and Markowitz’s refusal to pay up—made Hollywood angry enough in August 2000 to kidnap Markowitz’s younger half-brother Nick, with whom Markowitz was close.

When Hollywood learned that kidnapping could result in a sentence of life in prison, he decided to kill Nick or order him killed. That way, Nick could never testify against any of his abductors. Hollywood ordered Ryan Hoyt to commit the murder. A grave was dug in the mountains, and, bound with duct tape, Nick was taken to the site by his captors.

According to Los Angeles Magazine senior writer Jesse Katz, Ryan Hoyt “whacks Nick in the back of the head—cold cocks him [and] pulls out this Tech 9,” shooting his victim nine times. Nick “falls into this grave that had been dug for him, [and] they tuck the gun under Nick’s knees, [as they] now try to bury him,” but, as NBC News adds, “the grave [is] too shallow.” Located alongside a popular hiking trail, the burial site was spotted later, and leads poured in.^[10]

Theft, robbery, rootlessness, swindling, political corruption and vice, twisted desire, physical and sexual abuse, recklessness, and manipulation are associated with the horrific crimes on this list.

The criminal offenses, which include body-snatching, train robbery, kidnapping, and fraud, involve the use of picks and shovels, dynamite, “burking,” pistols, ropes, knives, water, machine guns, and, yes, even cameras. In addition, each has inspired a cinematic chiller or thriller nearly as terrifying and electrifying as the crime itself.

Related: 10 Things You Never Knew About Famous Movie Plot Twists

10 The Body Snatcher & The Flesh and the Fiends

William Burke (1792–1829) and William Hare (d. 1859?) most likely met while working as laborers on the Union Canal in Scotland. The work was hard labor, and they decided to quit. Instead of helping build the canal, they began to supply bodies to Edinburgh’s medical schools, which were always in need of cadavers for dissection during anatomy classes.

At first, they dug up graves and stole corpses, but they found that this enterprise was not much easier than the manual labor they had done while working on the canal. They soon hit upon a simpler, easier way of acquiring their stock in trade. Instead of snatching bodies from cemeteries under cover of darkness, they would simply murder people and sell their remains to the medical schools. In doing so, the partners in crime developed an undetectable technique for suffocating their victims. It was called “burking,” after Burke.

All went well—until their sixteenth murder—when a witness informed police that a dead body was being stored under Burke’s bed. Burke, his mistress Helen McDougall, Hare, and Hare’s “wife” Margaret were arrested (they were not actually married but lived as man and wife). Fearing there was insufficient evidence to convict the defendants, Lord Advocate Sir William Rae offered Hare immunity from prosecution in return for his testimony against his partner and their accomplices. His wife also received immunity.

As a result, Burke was hanged on January 28, 1829. McDougall was released after being acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Ironically, Burke’s body was donated to a medical school for dissection, and his skeleton remains on display at the University Medical School in Edinburgh. Although Hare’s ultimate fate is uncertain, one source states that he may have died in London, in 1859, as a blind beggar.

The Burke and Hare crimes are memorialized in a gruesome snatch of 19th-century verse, which includes a mention of one of their best customers, Dr. Robert Knox: “Up the close and doon the stair,/ But and ben’ wi’ Burke and Hare./Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,/ Knox the boy that buys the beef.”

Their body-snatching and murders also inspired the 1884 short story “The Body Snatcher” by Robert Louis Stevenson, which, in turn, loosely inspired the 1945 movie of the same title, directed by Robert Wise. The movie focuses on an unscrupulous doctor, Toddy MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), and his protege, medical student Donald Fettes (Russell Wade). They are blackmailed by John Gray (Boris Karloff), the body snatcher who supplies their cadavers, into remaining silent after Fettes discovers that Gray has committed murder in order to supply a corpse to them.

In the movie, Dr. Knox is not the murderous body-snatcher’s customer, but MacFarlane’s mentor, and, in one of the movie’s scenes, MacFarlane tells the story of Burke and Hare to Joseph (Bela Lugosi), an assistant (and another blackmailer). A number of complications develop, which include additional murders.

A later British film, The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)—released in the U.S. as Mania—is also based on the Burke and Hare murders. Directed by John Gilling, it stars Peter Cushing as Robert Knox, Donald Pleasance as William Hare, and George Rose as William Hare.^[1]

9 Special Agent

The DeAutremont brothers—twins Roy (1900–1983) and Ray (1900–1984) and Hugh (1904–1959), committed the American West’s last train robbery, the Meriden, Connecticut, Record-Journal notes in a December 22, 1984, article. The brothers, the newspaper explains, “jumped aboard…the Southern Pacific’ Gold Special’ bound for San Francisco as it passed through a remote mountain tunnel near Ashland,” hoping to relieve the U. S. Post Office Department of the articles in the mail car.

Things did not go exactly as planned. The dynamite they used to blow open the car scattered its contents. Worse yet, four of the train’s crew were shot by the heavily armed brothers. The attempted robbery failed for the very good reason that, as the robbers later discovered, the money they attempted to steal was never even on the train.

Fleeing the scene of the crime, the brothers assumed aliases, with Hugh joining the army. He was stationed in the Philippines, where a buddy, having seen his likeness on a wanted poster, notified police of his whereabouts. After growing mustaches as a disguise, the other brothers took jobs at a steel mill, but they were followed to Steubenville, Ohio, by authorities who were not fooled by their mustaches.

Charged with murdering three of the train’s crew members, Hugh pleaded not guilty, while the twins confessed. Nevertheless, all three brothers were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Hugh died there at age 55, but the twins were paroled, Ray in 1961 and Roy in 1983, after receiving a lobotomy in 1949. Asked what had possessed him and his brothers to attempt to rob the train and kill three people in the process, Ray said, “I suppose at the time I was carrying my share of adolescent neurosis.”

The attempted robbery and the murders committed by the DeAutremont brothers inspired the 1949 film Special Agent. Directed by William C. Thomas and starring William Eythe, the movie features two, rather than three, brothers, farmers Edmond and Paul Devereaux, played by Paul Valentine and George Reeves, respectively.

Hoping to avert the financial disaster threatening their farm, the brothers take it upon themselves to rob a train, which puts investigating Detective Johnny Douglas hot on their trail. To lend authenticity to the production, the opening credits point out, “This picture is based on material in the official files of the American Railroads,” but cites the fictitious “Devereaux Case,” rather than the crimes of the DeAutremont brothers.^[2]

8 The Hitch-Hiker

When he left prison at age 21, Billy “Cockeyed” Cook told his father that he had but one ambition in life: to live by the gun and roam. Hitchhiking in Texas in December 1950, he began living his dream as he kidnapped a driver who’d stopped to give him a ride. His victim, whom Cook had forced into the trunk of his car, escaped.

The next man Cook kidnapped, 33-year-old Illinois farmer Carl Mosser, who was on his way to New Mexico, was not as fortunate, nor was his family, who was traveling with him. They made the same mistake as Cook’s first victim: they stopped to offer the hitchhiking killer a ride.

After they drove to Cook’s hometown of Joplin, Missouri, Cook shot Mosser, his wife Thelma, 29; their sons Ronald, 7, and Gary, 5; and their daughter Pamela Sue, 2—and the family’s dog—before dumping their bodies down a well. Near Blythe, California, Cook kidnapped a deputy. The lawman was lucky; Cook had once worked with the deputy’s wife, who had treated him well, so Cook was generous: he spared his victim’s life.

A Seattle salesman named Robert Dewey was not as fortunate. Cook shot him, dumping his corpse into a ditch. The outlaw’s murder spree ended a few days later when the killer forced two hunters to drive him to Mexico. There, Santa Rosalie Police Chief Luis Parra recognized Cook, arrested him, and turned him over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In Oklahoma, Cook was tried and convicted of killing Mosser and his family and received a sentence of 300 years in prison. The justice system was not finished with Cook, however. In California, found guilty of having murdered Dewey, he was sentenced to death. He was executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber on December 12, 1952, at age 23, having accomplished his life’s goal “to live by the gun and roam.”

As reporter Ben Cosgrove points out, in a Life magazine article concerning the killer, Cook became the subject of a movie “less than a year after he was put to death.” Written and directed by actress/director Ida Lupino and starring William Talman as Emmett Myers, The Hitch-Hiker is “one of [Hollywood’s] first films…clearly based on a killer whose crimes were still fresh in the minds of filmgoers.” ^[3]

7 The Night of the Hunter

Supposedly, Harry Powers was a self-described lonely heart. According to his 1939 American Friendship Society advertisement, he was a wealthy widower who earned between $400 and $2,000 a month and was worth more than $100,000. He also had a lovely “10-room brick home” in which his future wife could be more than comfortable; he promised to buy her a car and give her plenty of spending money, so she could “enjoy herself.”

Chicago widow Asta Eicher, 50, thought she had found Mr. Right. A man like Powers, who called himself “Mr. Pierson” in his ad, could support both her and her children—Greta, 14; Harry, 12; and Annabel, 9—very nicely, indeed! Oddly, it seemed that the couple would live in Eicher’s house rather than his 10-room brick home. To make room for the new love of her life, who visited her frequently at home, she asked her boarder, William O’Boyle, to move out.

When the former boarder returned to Eicher’s residence to retrieve some tools he had forgotten, he saw “Mr. Pierson,” but there was no sign of either his former landlady or her children. Oddly, Eicher’s boyfriend was busy carrying the family’s belongings from the house. Pierson could explain, though. Handing O’Boyle a letter, allegedly from Eicher, which supported his claims, he told O’Boyle that she and her children had moved to Colorado, asking him to take care of her outstanding personal business. Further details were unavailable, it seemed, which made O’Boyle suspicious, as it did the police, who decided an investigation was in order.

Love letters led investigators to a place near Quiet Dell, West Virginia, which would acquire the nickname “murder farm.” In a garage, police found Eicher’s personal property and the bodies of Eicher, her children, and another victim, Northboro (also spelled Northborough), Massachusetts, divorcee Dorothy Lemke, age 50.

Police discovered that Powers had preyed upon women for decades. A trunk on the premises contained over 100 letters to and from “loved-starved widows and spinsters from all over the country,” reports Mara Bovsun, in a New York Daily News article. His modus operandi had been to date the women, drain their bank accounts, and leave them—or, in the cases of Lemke, Eicher, and the latter’s family, kill them.

Less than two hours after the jury began its deliberation, members reached a verdict. Found guilty, Powers was sentenced to hang. Before his execution on March 18, 1932, he was asked if he had any final words to offer. The man who had confessed to police that he had hanged his victims one at a time, allowing 12-year-old Harry “to watch the killing of his mother and the others,” until the boy began to scream and Powers, fearing someone hearing the boy, “picked up a hammer and let him have it,” proved strangely reticent, saying simply, “No.” ^[4]

The Night of the Hunter (1955), directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, and Billy Chapin, is loosely based on Powers’s crimes. However, the film departs significantly in some ways from its inspiration. Mitchum, as Harry Powell, a self-proclaimed minister who says he does God’s work by fleecing women out of their money before killing them, marries widow Willa Harper but encounters a problem when her children refuse to divulge the place in which their father hid the $10,000 he stole during a robbery. After killing Willa, he is arrested, and police rescue him from a lynch mob. As he is led away, however, the state’s executioner promises to see Powell again before long.

6 The Phenix City Story

Phenix City, Alabama, was a hotbed of lawlessness, both during the Great Depression when it was a refuge for bootleggers and following World War II, when nearby Fort Benning, Georgia, soldiers frequented its seedy bars, brothels, and gambling establishments. A Washington Times article points out that Albert Patterson, the Democratic candidate for state attorney general, attempted to clean the city up, but his assassination ended those efforts. It also made national headlines—and became the basis for a 1955 movie.” Patterson’s son, John, explained how corruption and vice mushroomed in Phenix City in the 1930s. The city “opted to permit illegal gambling to get the funds to run their town and pay off their bonded debt [and] folks…at the state Capitol looked the other way [and the feds] did not get involved.”

Once the criminals gained control of juries and ballots, Patterson was the last hope of the good citizens of the town. Unfortunately, he was murdered on June 18, 1954. Although Circuit Solicitor Arch Ferrell was tried and acquitted, Albert Fuller, Russell County’s chief sheriff’s deputy, was convicted of murdering Patterson and spent 10 years in prison before being paroled.

As a result of Patterson’s assassination, Governor Gordon Persons declared martial law and ordered the National Guard to act as local law enforcement. In addition, the local judiciary was replaced. Special agents of the state’s Investigative and Identification Division (now the Alabama Bureau of Investigation) launched an investigation, and “the organized crime syndicate running Phenix City was completely dismantled within six months.” Ultimately, it exposed the magnitude of the corruption and criminality that Patterson had opposed in Phenix City. Once the investigation was complete, the grand jury brought 734 indictments, including charges against many law enforcement officers, local business owners connected to organized crime, and elected officials.

The Phenix City Story (1955) is based on Patterson’s assassination. Directed by Phil Karlson, the movie makes Rhett Tanner (Edward Andrews) the city’s crime lord, who runs the town’s bars, brothels, and gambling establishments, while paying off the police. When political candidate Albert “Pat” Patterson (John McIntire) promises to clean up the corruption and vice, he is murdered, and his son John (Richard Kiley), having returned home after serving in the military, vows to avenge his father’s death.^[5]

5 While the City Sleeps

William Heirens, 17, the notorious “Lipstick Killer,” spent 65 years and 181 days of his three consecutive life sentences in prison, the last at the Dixon Correctional Center in Dixon, Illinois. That is where he died in 2012, at the age of 83, his confession to three murders having landed him in prison on November 15, 1928. The novel The Bloody Spur, by Charles Einstein, is based on Heirens’s heinous crimes. The book became the basis of the 1956 movie While the City Sleeps.

The killer’s victims included two women, Josephine Ross and Frances Brown, and 6- or 7-year-old Suzanne Degnan (accounts differ regarding her age). Brown had been stabbed through the neck and shot in the head. Ross had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck. Regarding all three victims, the killer’s motive, he confessed to police, was the same: sexual pleasure.

A contemporary account of the police’s investigation of the kidnapped child’s murder, which appeared in The Daily Banner, a Greencastle, Indiana, newspaper, describes the results of the horrific crime: “The child’s blonde, curly head, her legs and torso were found…in separate cesspools within a one-block radius of her parents’ home.” An ax had been used to dismember and decapitate her, police said.

While the City Sleeps (1956), directed by Fritz Lang, departs quite a bit from the actual crimes, focusing on a contest among a news company’s journalists to identify the serial murderer known as the “Lipstick Killer” (John Drew Barrymore). The winner received a promotion, becoming the organization’s new executive producer. The film also stars Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, Ida Lupino, and George Sanders.^[6]

4 Butterfield 8

Starr Faithfull was a beautiful young flapper who, according to her diary, lived what police characterized as a promiscuous lifestyle that involved sexual escapades with 19 men. Her parents were poor, but her wealthy cousins paid her tuition at Rogers Hall Academy in Lowell, Massachusetts, an exclusive boarding school.

Unfortunately, an adult cousin, Andrew J. Peters, “doused her with ether…and seduced her,” often taking her on overnight road trips with him. As a teen, she behaved oddly at times, hiding her femininity by wearing boy’s attire. After her parents divorced and her mother, Helen, married Stanley Faithfull, Starr took his name as her surname. She began attending parties, abused alcohol, barbiturates, and inhalers. She behaved erratically and, on one occasion, overdosed on “sleeping drugs.”

When she reported Peters’s abuse to her mother, Peters bought Helen’s and Stanley’s silence. On June 8, 1931, Faithfull’s body was found on a deserted beach amid some seaweed. Perhaps intending to stow away aboard a ship bound for the Bahamas, she had drowned, her autopsy revealed, but “bruises suggested she had had help.”

Neither an investigation nor an inquest determined whether Faithfull’s death had resulted from murder or suicide. Still, her diary mentioned “AJP” as one of the men with whom she had had a sexual liaison. The public wondered whether the initials stood for her cousin, Andrew J. Peters, especially after Faithfull’s stepfather, believing her to have been murdered, confronted the district attorney about the case, accusing him of poorly investigating and prosecuting the case. He even gave the D.A. the agreement Peters had him sign in 1927 with a copy of the check he received—for $20,000—to “hold Peters harmless.”

After Faithfull’s death, it was reported that peters had a nervous breakdown. On the other hand, Dr. George Jameson Carr revealed that Faithfull had sent him letters, one of which referred to her dull and worthless life, declaring her desire for “oblivion.” Whether murder or suicide claimed Faithfull’s life, it seems clear that her cousin’s sexual abuse may well have contributed to her demise.

The story of Faithfull’s fateful life is the basis of Butterfield 8 (1960), directed by Daniel Mann, in which Elizabeth Taylor reluctantly plays Starr Faithfull. A later biography revealed that she did not want to play the part but was under contract with MGM Studios, who forced her to star in the film. Despite her reluctance to portray Faithfull, Taylor won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Butterfield 8.^[7]

3 Mad Dog Coll

Critics were not kind to Mad Dog Coll (1961). The New York Times’s reviewer Harold Thompson thought the film “belongs back in the pound.” Directed by Burt Balaban, the movie stars John Davis Chandler as Mad Dog Coll and Vincent Gardenia as Dutch Schultz; Telly Savalas appears as Lt. Darro. The film opens with a memorable scene: Coll machine-gunning his abusive father’s headstone.

As the leader of a street gang, he keeps his Tommy gun handy and never hesitates to use it to spray his enemies with bullets. In general, the movie’s plot plays fast and loose with the life and crimes of Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. The sensationalized nature of the film is made clear to prospective audiences by its poster’s description of the hitman as a “maniac with a machine gun” and his terrifying effect on crime lords who “tremble when Killer Coll calls.”

That’s not to say that Coll was anything but a vicious, ruthless killer, the worst of his acts being the killing of a child, albeit accidentally. Active during Prohibition, Coll was wild and unpredictable, and he was reckless. After Dutch Schultz killed his brother Peter in May 1931, Coll sought revenge by hunting down and killing four of Schultz’s men in the next three weeks. In addition, his gang and Schultz’s continued to face off—often amid gunfire—in the streets of New York, where many men fell dead.

In June, as he attempted to kidnap rival bootlegger Joseph Rao, a spray of his bullets struck five children, killing a five-year-old boy. The horrendous deed resulted in New York’s Mayor Jimmy Walker calling Coll a “Mad Dog.” Later brought to trial, Coll was acquitted, only to be shot on February 8, 1932. At age 23, Mad Dog was dead.^[8]

2 10 to Midnight

10 to Midnight, the 1983 movie directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Charles Bronson as Detective Leo Kessler, is based on the murders committed by Richard Speck. The criminal’s cinematic counterpart, Warren Stacey (Gene Davis), is an amoral, nearly psychotic serial killer who delights in the murder of naked women—with himself also in the nude. Willing to do whatever needs to be done to take the ruthless killer off the street, Kessler plants evidence, despite his partner’s objections, and, when the suspect is released on a technicality, goes after him: a cop turned vigilante.

The particulars of Richard Speck’s crimes are fairly well known. On July 14, 1966, he killed eight women, all student nurses, in a Chicago townhouse. The horror of the killings came back to John Schmale when he discovered a cardboard box in his basement after inspecting the cellar after it had flooded. The box contained four carousels of slides, heavily damaged and water-logged. They were part of the legacy left to him by his father. The slides included images of his sister Nina, one of Speck’s victims.

Ironically, Speck’s deeds made him infamous, while his victims have been largely forgotten. Schmale believed they should be remembered: Nina Jo Schmale, Patricia Ann Matusek, Pamela Lee Wilkening, Mary Ann Jordan, Suzanne Bridget Farris, Valentina Pasion, Merlita Gargullo, and Gloria Jean Davy.

The 2007 horror movie Chicago Massacre is also based on the Richard Speck murders. It was directed by Michael Feifer and stars Corin Nemec as Speck. The film begins with the father’s abuse of the main character as a child, which causes the boy to run away from home. Subsequently, he marries, is divorced, and begins his torture-and-murder spree. Afterward, he drifts until an attempt at suicide lands him in a hospital, where a doctor spots a tattoo that alerts him to the fact that his patient is wanted by the authorities. Speck is arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison, where he dies.^[9]

1 To Die For

Although accounts of high school educators, both male and female, having sex with students have increased dramatically in recent years, such trysts were far less common—or perhaps only far less commonly reported—in the past. In 1990, one such case involved 22-year-old Pamela Smart, a New Hampshire high school media coordinator found guilty of conspiring with a student, William Flynn, then 15, with whom she was having an affair, to kill her husband. To this day, Smart, now 54, says she never asked Flynn to kill anyone, but she has been twice denied a reduction of her life sentence.

The murder of Smart’s husband, Greggory, inspired the 1995 movie To Die For, directed by Gus Van Sant. It stars Nicole Kidman as Suzanne Stone-Maretto, a Smart-like woman seeking independence from her husband Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon), and Joaquin Phoenix as Jimmy Emmett, the teen she seduces into murdering Larry.

As might be expected, details of the film’s plot differ somewhat from those of the true crime on which the movie is based. Stone-Maretto, an aspiring television journalist, wants her husband dead for reasons that differ from Smart’s motive. Likewise, in the actual crime, the Mafia played no role in avenging the husband’s death, as the mob does in the film. Art may imitate life, but the two are seldom the same.

Although the movie was generally well-received, one person did not care for Kidman’s portrayal of the murderous seducer—Smart herself. Smart found the Academy Award-winning actress’s representation of her both embarrassing and inaccurate as well as simplistic. Although Smart considers Kidman an acclaimed actress, the convicted killer finds Kidman to have played her as though Smart is a complete airhead and points out that Kidman never consulted her about how to play the part. Instead, the actress “played a one dimensional character.” Smart insisted, “I’m not that person.” ^[10]

Science fiction writers love setting their stories sometime in humanity’s future. In the infinite hypothetical playground, writers are free to create any fate for our species that they want. While some are smart enough to set their stories thousands of years in the future and keep their predictions tame, some go all-in on mind-controlled Gundams fighting kaiju before Tom Holland even becomes a Spider-man. As a cheer to all the sci-fi films that invented insane and implausible futures, as well as the ones who eerily nailed it, here are ten cinematic predictions of the future that didn’t⁠—or won’t⁠—come true.

Related: 10 Intriguing Visions Of The Future From The Past

10 Every Terminator

Writers built the Terminator franchise around time travel, and because of that, the movies have created many different timelines. Each timeline is as canonical and non-canonical as the next, and each is subject to complete revision when the next sequel is inevitably released. But if there’s one thing they all share, it’s a total overestimation of robotics, artificial intelligence, and the manufacturing industry.

The Terminator predicted that an advanced artificial intelligence would have become self-aware in the far-flung future of August 29th, 1997. Not only aware but powerful enough to take control of almost every electronic system in the world, operate them all at once, outthink billions of humans, and somehow manufacture an army of killer robots. And yes, humans were only able to build Skynet so early due to reverse-engineering pieces of the T-800 that were left in 1984, but a blatant predestination paradox makes for a poor excuse.

9 Escape from New York

Staying in 1997, we have the bleak vision of America predicted by the 1981 movie Escape From New York. The film predicted a 400% increase in the crime rate (and by the way, not violent crime rate, just crime rate, meaning it could be littering) by 1988, which forced state and federal governments to turn Manhattan into a prison island. The sequel Escape from L.A. posited the same future, just in Los Angeles in 2013.

The problem with the future depicted in these films is twofold. First, it is wildly pessimistic, assuming that the uptick in crime in the ’80s would snowball into a violent, lawless hellscape. Second, it imagines a government that doesn’t care about things like assets, soft power, operation costs, lost revenue, or arming prisoners with a metropolis’s worth of goods and weapons. It’s eerie how chilling our fears of the future were back then. I can only imagine if a third film came out, what fears we’d see now.

8 Daybreakers

2009’s Daybreakers predicted that by 2019, vampires would overrun the world. Not just hematophages, examples of which already exist within the animal kingdom, but full-on mythical vampires. Immortal, killed by sunlight, the whole Transylvanian shebang. More than that, it predicted the process would only take ten years. 

It’d be easy to argue that the Daybreakers future was unrealistic due to the folkloric monsters it was based on, but really, the timeline is the bigger issue. Between 2009 and 2019, just ten years, most of the world turns from human to vampire (or vampire food). (Insert epidemiological study of vampire transmission here.) Vampires can establish vast underground roads and complexes to avoid the sun; invent, manufacture, and distribute UV-filtered cars; create large-scale human blood farms; and establish vampiric science labs. Apparently, vampires’ real superpower is their work ethic.

7 Blade Runner

Blade Runner came out in 1982 and assumed that by 2019, humanity would be, well, a heck of a lot farther along than us sad sacks are. Although the setting is dystopian on the surface⁠—crowded, poor, and corrupt⁠—it implies an overall triumph of the human spirit that 2019 just wasn’t able to live up to.

Humanity has conquered the stars, has colonies across the galaxy (at least as far as Orion), and has developed genetic engineering and artificial intelligence technologies so advanced that they can create artificial beings indistinguishable from humans. And they even use the technology to recreate endangered animals. Add the flying cars and holograms, and you have a pretty different 2019.

6 Barb Wire

Okay, Barb Wire deserves some credit. The film was never meant to tackle the deep questions of society and earn praise for its accuracy, yet it still got its hypothetical future fairly close. Barb Wire imagined that the U.S. would have undergone a second civil war by 2017. Though that obviously didn’t happen, the political tension in the country did reach a fever pitch.

Where Barb Wire gets it really wrong, however, is thinking that a nightclub owner in form-fitting leather bodysuits who spends hours every day on her makeup and hair would be America’s savior. I guess it may take just as long to squeeze into a leather bodysuit, too. Don’t get me wrong, it’s clear that Snake Plissken feathers his hair every now and then, but at least he’s former special forces.

5 Waterworld

Waterworld played it smart. It is set only in an unknown distant future, and even the more specific date given by its creators is still some time in the 2500s. Combined with its apocalyptic premise, it’s impossible to critique Waterworld’s predictions of technology or society. We can, however, rag on its predictions of human evolution.

In the movie, Kevin Costner was born with working gills and webbed feet. Unattractive, Costner. The last time any of our ancestors had gills was around 370 million years ago, so the number of perfectly correct mutations necessary to reactivate and repair those genes is mind-boggling. It could also be a whole new set of genes, though they would have had to evolve together, with no transitional forms (unless his parents were half mutant), and been immediately functional. That’s like two normal parents having a baby with two fully functional octopus tentacles on top of his human arms.

4 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick’s landmark 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey makes the list for one weird reason: it accurately predicted so many technologies and yet somehow couldn’t grasp a distant future without interior design from the ’60s.

The film was eerily prescient, so much so that it made people question whether or not Kubrick faked the moon landing. It predicted voice-identification, video-calling, flat-screen televisions, and tablets. It even predicted Russian/U.S. cooperation on a space station even though the Cold War was in full swing in 1968. That makes it especially odd that everyone in the movie apparently uses the same tailor, hairstylist, and makeup artist as Austin Powers.

3 Every Star Trek

Star Trek chose the sensible option and set its main stories in the 2200s and 2300s. Almost anything is plausible with 300 years to work on it. On top of that, the imagined technologies in Star Trek have inspired actual technological innovations, making them more plausible every year. But the Trek universe also filled in a lot of history before the 2200s, and it didn’t all quite shake out.

The best example comes in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982), which makes it clear that the 1990s would see the Eugenics Wars, followed by genetically engineered super-people like Khan taking over most of the planet. The closest we’ve to that since the ’90s is The Rock’s meteoric rise to stardom.

2 Mad Max

The first Mad Max predicted a Gulf war in the ’80s (so far so good) that would cause fluctuations in oil production (still good) and cause social and economic turmoil (nailed it). Then it kept going. The whole world is subject to a disastrous financial crisis, many world governments collapse, others declare martial law, and eventually, this all leads to global nuclear war. (We still have time for this to play out, by the way.)

All of this is caused by a lack of oil. Whether that’s realistic or not, what is firmly unrealistic is how everyone in every Mad Max is so wasteful with oil, even spraying it around in celebration, despite it being the world’s most precious commodity. Gasoline, now called Guzzolene, is poured on people’s heads, spit into engines, and burned to make a guitar into a guitar-flamethrower. Then again, human stupidity is not that unrealistic.

1 Snowpiercer

Snowpiercer imagines a 2014 where the entire globe is subject to a new ice age, with only a few surviving humans, most subjected to runaway elitism and cruelty. Aside from the 2014 part, that sounds pretty plausible. What makes the Snowpiercer future so unlikely is that its apocalypse arose from governments caring far too much about climate change.

The ice age in Snowpiercer was caused by the world’s governments uniting against the threat of global climate change, putting their best scientists to the task of fixing it, and creating a large-scale stratospheric aerosol spray to dim the sun’s rays. All by 2014. The cricket-eating makes sense. The world-length train tracks are fine. But the idea that humanity would unite for the common good and try their best at fixing the planet by 2014 is the most implausible thing on this list.