10 real-life crimes inspired by movies

‘A Clockwork Orange’

This one was only a matter of time.

Both Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange and its Stanley Kubrick-helmed film adaptation concern themselves with a juvenile delinquent named Alex, causing sadistic mayhem with a literal song in his heart wherever he goes. Many people who took in his story worried that Alex would provide an inspiration to people looking to inflict similar levels of harm on others, rather than a deterrent.

Those people were absolutely correct. In 1973, a 16-year-old boy attacked an unhoused person in London while singing ‘Singin’ In the Rain’ in a direct echo of Alex’s actions in the most horrifying scene in the (already pretty horrifying) movie. He wasn’t alone, with several street gangs reportedly roaming the UK dressed in similar white suits and attacking random people. The backlash was so intense that Kubrick himself pulled the film from UK cinemas.

A ban that lasted all the way until 2000.

 ‘The Town’

Ben Affleck’s second directorial effort is a perfectly cromulent crime thriller that should probably be best remembered for securing Pete Postlethwaite a posthumous ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Bafta nomination.

Yet the truth is, there’s only one thing that people remember from this film. Which is, in fairness, the pretty memorable sight of a group of tough-nuts robbing a bank dressed in nuns’ outfits with horrific rubber masks over their habits.

Turns out, some people weren’t just remembering it as a cool image from a cool crime drama, because a year after the film’s release in 2010, an identical robbery took place at a suburban Chicago bank. Its perpetrators are sporting a similar get-up of nuns’ robes and a ghoulish mask. Unlike in The Town, the perps were caught pretty soon afterwards. Turns out it was a disgruntled former employee of the bank who robbed the place with her then-boyfriend.

‘Fight Club’

The effect this film has on teenage white boys should probably be studied in a lab. How this film is passed on from generation to generation like a Lynx-branded holy text is baffling, if only because of how few of them actually understand it.

The idea of an actual “Fight Club” is bad. The idea of an actual “Project Mayhem” is bad. The idea of following the rules of a charismatic leader who doesn’t follow them himself is bad. You can see this if you watch or read the popular Chuck Palahniuk psychological thriller Fight Club.

Yet, it never seems to stick with anyone that you shouldn’t follow any kind of Tyler Durden, no matter what they look or sound like. Case in point, 17-year-old Kyle Shaw. “Inspired” by the novel (and those are some king-sized inverted commas by the way), Shaw built a bomb out of electrical tape, a firework and a bottle and set it off outside a New York City Starbucks in 2009.

Viva la revolución.

‘Twilight’

Don’t let the nostalgia fool you, Twilight is bad and always has been.

The only unfair thing about the way the book and its accompanying film series were treated was the fact that the vast majority of the hate it got was due to its target audience being women. Yet women weren’t the only people who became obsessive with the books, and I fail to see any of them being quite as disturbing about it as an unnamed 13-year-old boy was in Iowa shortly after the first film came out.

A female classmate of his had come forward and said that this boy had, apropos of nothing at all, bitten her on the neck hard enough to draw blood. The school’s vice principal began an investigation and found that the boy had done the same to no less than ten other classmates over the past couple of weeks.

When contacted about it, the boy’s father stated that his son had an obsession with the Twilight saga, and it was probably done as a way of imitating his hero, Edward Cullen.

‘Scream’

Yup, you knew this one was going to be on the list, didn’t you?

Skeet Ulrich, you should probably change your name to Nostradamus. It would be an improvement on Skeet. That’s the last bit of levity you’re going to get on this list, by the way, because from here on out, things get real dark, real quick. Case in point, the story of Thierry Jardin, a 24-year-old Belgian who asked out his neighbour, who was making romantic advances towards his 15-year-old neighbour. Gross.

When she turned him down, he donned the Ghostface mask and robe before stabbing her 30 times. In a nauseating final move, he laid her body down on his bed, slipped a rose into her hand, then called his father and a colleague of his to confess. The crime had been premeditated, and however their interaction had gone, the plan was always for her to die. Her name was Alisson Cambier.

‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’

Now, this sounds like a difficult one to emulate.

Freddy Krueger, the main antagonist of the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and one of the most iconic horror characters of all time, has a signature M.O., you see. He invades the dreams of his victims and kills them in surreal, grotesque ways. Normally, with a pithy quip, if you’ve seen some of the original film’s sillier sequels. You might notice that that’s a little impossible for a human being to do, but that didn’t stop one lost soul trying to emulate the scarred nonce.

Daniel Gonzalez was obsessed with horror movies. By the age of 24, he’d been receiving treatment for severe mental health problems since the age of 17, and his mother was terrified that he was going to snap and hurt someone. This fear was founded, after over two nightmarish days in September 2004, Gonzalez murdered four random people in a spree that took him from Hove to Highgate. In several letters that he addressed to himself, Gonzalez said that he wanted to do it in honour of his hero, Freddy Krueger, someone he saw a lot of himself in.

‘Saw’

If you actually watch the Saw movies, it becomes clear that Jigsaw, the sociopathic murderer at the centre of them all, is as much of a super-powered villain as anyone Batman’s ever faced. There’s nothing the man’s not an expert in, from chemistry to mechanics to toymaking to disguise and everywhere in between. Maybe that’s why the attempts to emulate him that made the news are mainly failed attempts at replicating his deadly games.

That doesn’t mean that people didn’t suffer because of them. Quite the opposite. In 2009, two teenage boys were arrested in Salt Lake City after setting up a series of Saw-style booby traps involving swinging blades and trip wires. Another came in 2011, where a Jigsaw-style serial killer was caught after sending a number of letters to local newspapers in Canada, threatening to play a deadly game with unsuspecting victims.

‘Natural Born Killers’

A truly depressing case of the legacy of an entire film being defined by the senseless, horrific crimes that it inspired. A strong word considering that anyone inspired to commit murders by Natural Born Killers clearly didn’t watch the whole thing. However, it does depict Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis murdering a bunch of folks and looking absurdly hot while doing it.

There are always going to be broken people who look up to fictional characters like that, and Sarah Edmondson and her boyfriend Ben Darras took it to the next level. After a night spent watching Natural Born Killers over and over again, they went on a spree of violence that killed one person and left another paraplegic before they were arrested a few days later. They should have been the last, but they weren’t, with copycat crimes being committed as recently as 2008.

‘The Dark Knight’

It’s a meme now, but seriously, there are few villains from movies with the power of Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight. It’s a darkly spellbinding, instantly iconic performance that deserves to be talked about in the same breath as Anton Chigurh and Norman Bates more than any comic book villain. The kind of performance that is just as compelling and seductive as any vision of the iconic Batman villain.

It’s a testament to the legacy of the character that it wasn’t completely overshadowed by the real-life crime committed in its image. At a midnight screening of The Dark Knight‘s sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes set off a number of smoke bombs at the exit doors of the cinema before opening fire on the audience, killing 12 people. When he was captured by the police, it was reported that he told them, “I’m The Joker.”

 ‘Taxi Driver’

Arguably, the most famous incident on this list is also the oldest.

In 1976, Martin Scorsese’s jet-black drama Taxi Driver became one of the most infamous movies of the year. One of the reasons for this was the casting of 12-year-old Jodie Foster as a child prostitute, a decision that was controversial even at the time. John Hinckley Jr was one of the many people who watched the film and, unlike the vast majority of people who watched it, developed an obsession with Foster.

In his delusion, he reasoned that, if Travis Bickle could get the attention of Jodie Foster by nearly killing a presidential candidate (he doesn’t go through with it in the film), he would go one step further by killing the president himself. Hinckley did go through with his ludicrous scheme, shooting Ronald Reagan in 1981, who lived through the attempt on his life. Hinckley was arrested and, a year later, found not guilty by reason of insanity.