Horror films based on true stories

A number of well-known horror films are based on actual events.

1999's Ravenous, for example, was inspired by the activities of Alfred Packer in the 1870s while A Nightmare On Elm Street had its roots in the "Asian Death Syndrome" affecting Khmer refugees in the 1970s.

Elsewhere, David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers was inspired by the careers and demise of identical twin gynaecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus who practiced at New York Hospital and Cornell University Medical College. The pair died together in 1975, the result of drug withdrawal following prolonged and extensive use of barbiturates.

And most will know about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper’s seminal 1974 horror film is entirely fictional. However, Leatherface and the psychotic family who attack and mutilate a group of innocent people have motivations and modus operandi mimicking that of notorious mad man Ed Gein. 

The Mad Butcher was arrested following investigations into the disappearance of shop owner Bernice Worden in late 1957. The woman’s body was found at Gein’s home, her head missing. It was here that investigators also found human remains which had been fashioned into furniture such as a wastebasket made out of human skin and bowls made from skulls. The Texan native was found to have murdered at least two people while exhuming a number of recently buried bodies to make various domestic items.

See Top 10 Films' list of the best horror films based on a true story here. 

Remembering Superman

 Some of the best bits from Richard Donner's Superman. 

Superman (stylized as Superman: The Movie) is a 1978 superhero film directed by Richard Donner, supervised by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, produced by their partner Pierre Spengler, written by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton from a story by Puzo based on the DC Comics character of the same name. It is the first installment in the Superman film series. An international co-production between the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Panama and the United States,^[3] the film stars an ensemble cast featuring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Jeff East, Margot Kidder, Glenn Ford, Phyllis Thaxter, Jackie Cooper, Trevor Howard, Marc McClure, Terence Stamp, Valerie Perrine, Ned Beatty, Jack O'Halloran, Maria Schell, and Sarah Douglas. It depicts the origin of Superman (Reeve), including his infancy as Kal-El of Krypton, son of Jor-El (Brando) and his youthful years in the rural town of Smallville. Disguised as reporter Clark Kent, he adopts a mild-mannered disposition in Metropolis and develops a romance with Lois Lane (Kidder) whilst battling the villainous Lex Luthor (Hackman).

Ilya had the idea of a Superman film in 1973 and after a difficult process with DC Comics, the Salkinds and Spengler bought the rights to the character the following year. Several directors, most notably Guy Hamilton, and screenwriters (Mario Puzo, David and Leslie Newman, and Robert Benton), were associated with the project before Richard Donner was hired to direct. Tom Mankiewicz was drafted in to rewrite the script and was given a "creative consultant" credit. It was decided to film both Superman and its sequel Superman II (1980) simultaneously, with principal photography beginning in March 1977 and ending in October 1978. Tensions arose between Donner and the producers, and a decision was made to stop filming the sequel, of which 75 percent had already been completed, and finish the first film.^[7]

The most expensive film made up to that point, with a budget of $55 million,^[8][9] Superman was released in December 1978 to critical and financial success; its worldwide box office earnings of $300 million made it the second-highest-grossing release of the year. It received praise for Reeve's performance and John Williams' musical score,^[10] and was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Film Editing, Best Music (Original Score), and Best Sound, and received a Special Achievement Academy Award for Visual Effects.^[11] Groundbreaking in its use of special effects and science fiction/fantasy storytelling, the film's legacy presaged the mainstream popularity of Hollywood's superhero film franchises. In 2017, Superman was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.

Feelgood with Sky Cinema/Now TV

Current Sky Cinema/Now TV feelgood movies currently available to customers. 

Road Rage: when movies give the highway fangs

Road trips gone bad...

For years, cinema treated the road as a place of fun and adventure. There was cheerful competition in The Great Race (1965), family frolics in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), and magic in The Love Bug (1969). Meanwhile, Cliff Richard was off on his “Summer Holiday” in a converted London bus in Peter Yates’ musical from 1963.

Alfred Hitchcock had hinted at its dangers when Janet Leigh chose the wrong motel to stop at in Psycho but the road really began to grow fangs after audiences saw the bullet-riddled car of Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. It was the turn of the American New Wave and the road was looking decidedly different.

Road Rage movies. 

Examples:

Jeeper Creepers

Dir. Salva (2001)

Victor Salva’s malevolent road user The Creeper and “its” unrelenting pursuit of siblings Trish (Gina Philips) and Darry (Justin Long) across the Floridian countryside is pulsating entertainment of the horrific kind. Part Duel, part The Hitcher, part Christine, Jeepers Creepers unapologetically wallows in the tropes that its writer-director has clearly loved as a fan-turned-filmmaker.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Audiences well-versed in the conventions of the “monster movie” will enjoy Salva’s obvious earnestness to roll out the red carpet for them; the joy of watching in the expectation of jolts to the senses. Jeepers Creepers certainly fulfils that demand, helped by Salva’s clever horror beats that often elongate the tension before the payoff.

Dead End

Dir. Andrea/Canepa (2003)

The road gets a distinctly paranormal feel in this horror about a family seemingly trapped on the same stretch of highway. After Dad, Frank Harrington (Ray Wise) narrowly misses a head on collision things begin to go bump in the night as a series of strange occurrences befall him and his passengers.

Road Rage: Top 10 Films Featuring Terror On The Highway

The best British feelgood films

There's nothing quite like a good feelgood film. In this top 10, we check out great British feelgood films including A Fish Called Wanda, Hot Fuzz and Withnail and I.

Top 10 feelgood British films

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory - the film Roald Dahl hated

Why did Roald Dahl hate Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?

The film was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a 1964 children's novel by British author Roald Dahl. The story features the adventures of young Charlie Bucket inside the chocolate factory of eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964 and in the United Kingdom by George Allen & Unwin 11 months later. The book has been adapted into two major motion pictures: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in 1971, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005. The book's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was written by Roald Dahl in 1971 and published in 1972. Dahl had also planned to write a third book in the series but never finished it.^[1]

The story was originally inspired by Roald Dahl's experience of chocolate companies during his schooldays. Cadbury would often send test packages to the schoolchildren in exchange for their opinions on the new products.^[2] At that time (around the 1920s), Cadbury and Rowntree's were England's two largest chocolate makers and they each often tried to steal trade secrets by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other's factory. Because of this, both companies became highly protective of their chocolate-making processes. It was a combination of this secrecy and the elaborate, often gigantic, machines in the factory that inspired Dahl to write the story.^[3]

Source: Wikipedia

What about the film?

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a 1971 American musical fantasy film directed by Mel Stuart and starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. It is an adaptation of the 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. The film tells the story of a poor child named Charlie Bucket who, after finding a Golden Ticket in a chocolate bar, visits Willy Wonka's chocolate factory along with four other children from around the world.

Filming took place in Munich from August to November 1970. Dahl was credited with writing the film's screenplay; however, David Seltzer, who went uncredited in the film, was brought in to re-work the screenplay against Dahl's wishes, making major changes to the ending and adding musical numbers. These changes and other decisions made by the director led Dahl to disown the film.^[5][6] The musical numbers were written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley while Walter Scharf arranged and conducted the orchestral score.

The film was released by Paramount Pictures on June 30, 1971. With a budget of just $3 million, the film received generally positive reviews and earned $4 million by the end of its original run. The film gained a cult following and became highly popular in part through repeated television airings and home entertainment sales.^[7] In 1972, the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, and Wilder was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, but both nominations lost to Fiddler on the Roof. The film also introduced the song "The Candy Man", which went on to become a popular hit when recorded by Sammy Davis Jr. and has since been covered by numerous artists.

In 2014, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[8][9]

Source: Wikipedia

Guy Lodge of The Guardian thinks Roald Dahl had a point:

"Dahl himself would be exasperated over the 1971 film’s endurance. Though he was nominally billed as its screenwriter, his original adaptation was scarcely detectable beneath all manner of uncredited rewrites, and he was vocal in his disdain for the result, Wilder and all. His list of grievances was long: Dahl had wanted the arch British peculiarity of Spike Milligan or Peter Sellers for Wonka, he was unhappy with the film’s foregrounding of Wonka over Charlie, he resented plot alterations and additions that muddied the cautionary neatness of his original tale, and he wasn’t a fan of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s perky song score.

"An author not caring for a creatively divergent adaptation of his book is hardly a stop-the-presses scandal, of course. But after watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for the first time since my own childhood, where it was a VHS staple of 1980s schoolrooms and friends’ houses, I’m inclined to think he had a point. Stuart’s film is an odd, clunky beast, built from separate parts – a bit of Dahl’s updated Brothers Grimm misanthropy, a lot of cuddlier trends in 1970s family entertainment, and fading fumes from Hollywood’s blockbuster musical craze of the previous decade – that fit together as elegantly as Lego, Meccano and Play-Doh.

"Stuart, a workmanlike film-maker hitherto best-known for documentaries and sitcom-like farces, directed it with a halting, gear-grinding rhythm and an erratic sense of pace: it’s a stately 45 minutes before Wonka even makes his first appearance, whereupon the film rushes through its fantastical factory set pieces with businesslike indifference."

But does Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory deserve the wrath of its author?

The Story of Escape to Victory

Filmed in Hungary, the film is based on the 1962 Hungarian film drama Két félidő a pokolban ("Two half-times in Hell"), which was directed by Zoltán Fábri and won the critics' award at the 1962 Boston Cinema Festival.

The film was inspired by the now discredited story of the so-called Death Match in which FC Dynamo Kyiv defeated German soldiers while Ukraine was occupied by German troops in World War II. According to myth, as a result of their victory, the Ukrainians were all shot. The true story is considerably more complex, as the team played a series of matches against German teams, emerging victorious in all of them, before any of them were sent to prison camps by the Gestapo. Four players were documented as being killed by the Germans but long after the dates of the matches they had won.

Escape to Victory featured a great many professional footballers as both the POW team and the German team. Many of the footballers came from the Ipswich Town squad, who were at the time one of the most successful teams in Europe. Despite not appearing on screen, English World Cup-winning goalkeeper Gordon Banks and Alan Thatcher were closely involved in the film, working with Sylvester Stallone on his goalkeeping scenes. Sports Illustrated magazine said "the game is marvelously photographed by Gerry Fisher, under second unit director Robert Riger."

Since the movie is set in the early years of the German occupation of France (probably 1941 or 1942), Pelé's character, Corporal Luis Fernandez, is identified as being from Trinidad, not Brazil. The Brazilians did not join the war against the Axis powers until 1943, with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force arriving in Italy in 1944. Similarly, Argentinian star Osvaldo Ardiles' character, Carlos Rey, isn't identified as being from any particular country (as Argentina was mostly neutral during the war), though it is generally thought that Rey was from either Mexico or Costa Rica.

Source: Wikipedia

What are the best movies about football?