Credit: Dangerous Minds

Wes Craven’s Scream is one of the most influential horror movies of all time.

Smart, funny, sexy and genuinely frightening at points, it inspired legions of imitators at the box office. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Valentine, The Faculty and even Final Destination all took notes from the epoch-defining 1990s slasher classic, and in a just world, the only killings inspired by it would be fictional.

However, we don’t live in a just world, don’t we? As a generation of boys hold up the likes of Patrick Bateman, The Joker and Walter White up as the paragons of masculinity that they absolutely aren’t, we have to reckon with the fact that people are going to watch some of the greatest films and TV shows ever made and learn the opposite lesson to the one the film is trying to teach. In the case of Scream, they might learn that the best way of solving their problems is to don a set of robes, a dollar store mask and take a knife to a defenceless young woman.

It doesn’t matter that pretty much every Scream movie comes down on the side that the perpetrators are pathetic, broken losers (“My mom and dad are gonna be so mad at me!” All the love in the world to you, Matt Lillard), people will take whatever they want to take from the stories that matter to them. The first occasion of this was in January 1998, barely a month after Scream 2 hit the cinemas, when 16-year-old Mario Padilla and his cousin, 14-year-old Samuel Ramirez, stabbed Padilla’s mother 45 times, killing her.

The boys said they were inspired by the two Scream movies and murdered their victim for her money, intending to purchase two Ghostface masks and a voice changer used by the characters in the film. A year later, 13-year-old Ashley Murray was stabbed multiple times in the head and the back and left for dead by two older boys, 14-year-old Daniel Gill and 15-year-old Robert Fuller. Murray survived after being found by a neighbour, and during the resulting trial, Gill and Fuller were found to have watched the Scream films and had drawn pictures of the Ghostface mask in their school notebooks.

Still, the Scream connections to both those cases are tenuous at best and were most likely put in as part of their legal defence as a way of shifting the blame to someone else. This was not the case with the horrifying story of Alisson Cambier.

What real-life murders were inspired by Scream?

In November 2001, Thierry Jaradin, a 24-year-old Belgian truck driver, invited his neighbour, Alisson Cambier, over to his house.

Already, alarm bells were probably ringing in Cambier’s mind as she was 15 years old at the time, and she was right to, as Jaradin took her to his room and propositioned her. This adult was “in love” with this child and wanted to “consummate their relationship”. When she turned him down, he left the room, and when he returned, he was wearing a black robe, a Ghostface mask and holding a knife.

After Jaradin killed her, he immediately confessed to not only his crime, but also to the fact that he had planned to take her life; however, their encounter had gone. The other crimes here were most likely influenced by several late-night viewings of Craven’s masterpiece, but this is the only one so far that could be outright described as a copycat. Depressingly enough, Jaradin wouldn’t be the only one, because in 2006, the most infamous of all of these crimes would take place.

On September 22nd, 2006, Cassie Jo Stoddart was house-sitting for her aunt and uncle, along with her boyfriend Matt Beckham, when two of their friends, Brian Draper and Torey Adamcik, came over to hang out as well. By the end of the night, Draper and Adamcik had stabbed Stoddart over 30 times while wearing white painted masks after Beckham’s mother had come to pick him up. It turned out the two friends had planned this murder in exacting detail as a tribute to their two main influences, the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, and the Scream franchise.

Sometimes, people really can take a love of scary movies too far.