1000 Amazing Horror Movie Facts E-Book

Tom Chapman

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Think you know all there is to know about horror movies? Well, think again. 1000 Amazing Horror Movie Facts is chock full of fascinating and unusual facts about classic (and not so classic) horror movies. Blockbusters, B-movies, slashers, ghost stories, video nasties, anthologies, sequels, gore, cursed productions, what might have been, casting, controversy, and so on. So dim the lights and prepare to enter the spooky and blood drenched world of horror movies....

Leseprobe

Tom Chapman

1000 Amazing Horror Movie Facts

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Copyright

© Copyright 2022 Tom Chapman.

All Rights Reserved

Contents

Introduction

The Facts

Introduction

Think you know all there is to know about horror movies? Well, think again. 1000 Amazing Horror Movie Facts is chock full of fascinating and unusual facts about classic (and not so classic) horror movies. Blockbusters, B-movies, slashers, ghost stories, video nasties, anthologies, sequels, gore, cursed productions, what might have been, casting, controversy, and so on. So dim the lights and prepare to enter the spooky and blood drenched world of horror movies....

The Facts

(1) It is sometimes suggested that Michael Myers in the Halloween films is based on the real life serial killer Edward Kemper. This is not true. John Carpenter based Michael Myers on a 'devil eyed' child he saw in a mental institution.

(2) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was originally going to be called Head Cheese.

(3) The first film in the Saw franchise was shot in just 18 days.

(4) The story for Final Destination was originally proposed as an episode of The X-Files.

(5) 500 gallons of fake blood were used during production of the first Nightmare On Elm Street film.

(6) Special effects supervisor John Richardson, who staged the famous decapitation sequence in the 1976 film The Omen, was later involved in a car crash where his passenger, an assistant named Liz Moore, was decapitated for real. A sign near the accident marked the distance to a nearby town. It read - Ommen, 66.6 km.

(7) The serial killer Danny Harold Rolling, who became known as The Gainsville Ripper, was one of the inspirations for the Wes Craven movie Scream. Rolling had a habit of stalking and killing students.

(8) The Blair Witch Project cost only $60,000 to make but grossed $248.6 million.

(9) The famous theme song (by Lolita Ritmanis) to the Justice League cartoon is clearly stolen from the opening title music to the 1971 Hammer horror film Twins of Evil.

(10) John Landis made the early death of Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf in London as grisly and scary as possible to signal to audiences that this was a full blooded horror film - despite the sense of humour the movie patently has in spades.

(11) The production crew used real human skeletons in the 1982 film Poltergeist because they were cheaper to buy than realistic fake ones.

(12) The Bloody Benders are one of the inspirations for the Sawyer family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films. The Bloody Benders were a family of serial killers who lived in Labette County, Kansas. From 1871 to 1872 they are believed to have murdered around 20 people. The weird thing about the Bloody Benders is that the mother and daughter were a full part of the murders. Kate Bender, the daughter, would lure men to their house (which was a sort of general store) and Ma Bender would cook for them. While they were eating, the victims would be hit by a sledgehammer and have their throat cut. The motive for the murders was robbery. The Bloody Benders had their ruse uncovered when they killed a doctor. The brothers of the doctor organised a huge search for him in the area and the Bender home was searched. It was found to contain bodies which had been sent through a trapdoor. The locals burned down the Bender home. And the Bender family? They had vanished. No one really knows what happened to them.

(13) John Carpenter's The Thing was originally banned in Finland.

(14) The first Jack the Ripper film is believed to be The Lodger in 1926. This was Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel.

(15) Jaws is the scariest popcorn blockbuster ever made. The selection of the actress in the film to play Ellen Brody (the wife of the police chief played by Roy Scheider) was not exactly what you would call an open casting call. The producer on Jaws was Richard Zanuck and he promised the part of Ellen Brody to his wife Linda Harrison. Harrison was famously the supermodel cavegirl Nova in the Planet of the Apes franchise. With the producer being her husband, Linda Harrison must have felt fairly confident that she had the part of Ellen Brody in the bag. She was to be disappointed though. The part of Ellen Brody was instead given to Lorraine Gary. Lorraine Gary was the wife of Sid Sheinberg and Sheinberg was the head of Universal. In this game of casting top trumps, the studio boss had pulled rank on the producer.

(16) The video game that Nick Frost's character Ed frequently plays in Shaun of the Dead is TimeSplitters 2.

(17) John Carpenter said he didn't want to direct The Thing because he loved the original and didn't care much for remakes. He had no choice though because it was the first time a studio had offered him a big film and he couldn't really turn it down.

(18) David Cronenberg turned down an offer to direct the Star Wars film Return of the Jedi in order to make his cult 1983 body horror film Videodrome.

(19) Shaun of the Dead cost $4 million to make and grossed $30 million.

(20) If you watch The Exorcist II: the Heretic, you might notice Dana Plato in a small role. Plato shot to fame at the age of 13 when she won a part in the hugely popular eighties sitcom Diff’rent Strokes. Plato had to choose between an ice-skating career and acting and, all things considered, she probably should have stuck with the ice-skating. Plato was booted off of Diff’rent Strokes for getting pregnant and her career went nowhere fast - thanks in large part to her drug problems. She lost custody of her son and ended up doing softcore erotic films to make ends meet. Plato even had breast augmentation in the hope of becoming a Playboy model. Plato was found dead in an RV in 1999. The verdict was an overdose of painkillers and other medication. She was just 34 years old. Her money and fame was merely a distant memory by the time of her sad death.

(21) John Larroquette, who supplies the opening narration to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, said years later that he'd never watched the film and never got paid for his contribution to it.

(22) The famous film critic Roger Ebert was critical of Jarlath Conroy's Irish accent in George Romero's Day of the Dead for not being very convincing. Unknown to Ebert though, Conroy is actually Irish in real life. That was his actual voice!

(23) The 1976 film The Town That Dreaded Sundown was based on a true crime case known as The Texarkana Moonlight Murders. The Texarkana Moonlight Murders featured an unknown killer who seemed to have stepped straight out of a real life horror film.

The murders took place in a sleepy town named Texarkana (between both Texas and Arkansas) in 1946. The murders took place three months apart and there were some attacks too where the victims survived. The first attack was on Jimmy Hollis, 24, and his girlfriend, Mary Jeanne Larey, 19. The victims were parked in a car in a quiet spot. The attacker wore what looked like a pillow case over his head with holes cut for his eyes. He brutally beat Jimmy with a pistol (fracturing his skull in the process) and sexually assaulted Mary Jeanne. Jimmy and Mary Jeane survived the attack but were left with traumatic memories of this awful incident. They were not killed because the lights from a passing car scared the attacker away. A month later Richard Griffin, 29, and his girlfriend, Polly Ann Moore, 17, were shot dead in his car. Polly Ann Moore had been raped before she died. The police deduced that the victims had been shot outside the car and then put back in the car after their deaths. Three weeks later there was another shocking murder in the town. Fifteen year-old Betty Jo Booker and her friend Paul Brown were the victims. They had both been shot after stopping off close to a park. The killings were very brutal. Betty Jo had actually been shot in the face. She had also been raped. Her body was found some distance away from Paul Brown.

The police found that the same handgun had been used in both double-murders. This obviously meant that a serial killer was at large. Texarkana descended into panic at this latest double-murder. People began arming themselves and a curfew was put in place. Texarkana became the town that feared sundown. In May, a man named Virgil Starks was shot through his window while listening to the radio at home. His wife Katie was also shot as she tried to use the phone to get help. An intruder entered the house but Katie, despite her injuries, managed to escape and get to a nearby house. Was this the work of what had become known as The Phantom Slayer? It was possible although a different gun had been used this time. If this was the Phantom though it was to be the last attack. As for the police investigation, it was hobbled by the widely fluctuating alleged eyewitness accounts of the Phantom. The descriptions of the suspect were all over the place and not consistent. A college student confessed to the murders and then committed suicide but he was not believed to be the real killer.

The main suspect was Youell Swinney - a perennial car thief in the area. Swinney's wife told the police that he was the Phantom but then she retracted her story. As a consequence of this the police were never able to build a case against Swinney and find sufficient evidence to put him on trial. Swinney later ended up in prison for car theft. Those who believe he was the Phantom would point out that the killer never struck again once he was arrested. Swinney got out of prison in 1978 and died in 1994.

(24) Universal wanted Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi to play the leads in the classic John Landis film An American Werewolf in London.

(25) There are over fifty deadly traps in the Saw franchise.

(26) Prior to Sigourney Weaver being cast as female lead Ellen Ripley in Ridley Scott's Alien, the studio considered Kay Lenz, Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Genevieve Bujold, and Katherine Ross. Candice Bergen and Jane Fonda were both offered the part of Ripley but turned it down.

(27) The original concept for 1981's Halloween II was to have Michael Myers stalk Laurie Strode in a high rise tower.

(28) Stacy Keach was originally going to play Father Damien Karras in The Exorcist but they found Jason Miller and decided he would be a better fit for the character.

(29) The Wolf Creek horror films were based on Ivan Milat - a serial killer who murdered backpackers in the Australian outback. Milat was every bit as brutal and terrifying as Mick Taylor in the Wolf Creek films. Milat was the fifth of fourteen children born in Australia to Croatian immigrants. He was in and out of juvenile detention centres as a youngster and dangerously obsessed with knives and guns. His early crimes included theft, breaking and entering, and driving a stolen car. In 1971, Milat was charged with the abduction of two teenage hitchhikers - one of whom he raped. Milet fled to New Zealand in an attempt to evade the charges but was eventually arrested in 1974. However, the trial against him on kidnap charges collapsed.

He then got a job as a truck driver. This would turn out to be very bad news for some European backpackers. The victims of Milet were found in the Belanglo State Forest, 15 kilometres south-west of the New South Wales town of Berrima. Three were German and two were British. Milet even killed a couple of Australians. Milet would offer backpacking hitchhikers a lift in his truck and then restrain them at gunpoint. He would usually torture the victims before he killed them. One victim was stabbed 21 times in the chest and 19 times in the neck. Her spine had been severed. Another had been blindfolded, stabbed in the chest and then shot ten times. Milet was a terrifying man. He had a big Dennis Lilee mustache and an odiously creepy smile. He looked completely crazy. If you were backpacking in the outback miles from anywhere he was your worst nightmare. There was a huge police investigation when the bodies were discovered but it was a very difficult operation. Finding a killer in such a large area was literally like searching for a needle in a haystack. The crime scenes showed the victims had been sexually assaulted. There were also some bullet casings as the camp sites the killer had used. Milet would abduct the backpackers in pairs and then kill them separately. He genuinely seemed to love killing people and did so with sadistic relish.

The police managed to narrow the list of potential suspects down to 230 people but they then received some assistance from Paul Onions - a British backpacker who had escaped from Milet. Onions said that the man who offered him a lift and then pulled out a gun went by the name of Bill. He gave the police a description of 'Bill'. The police had further assistance from a former girlfriend of Milet who suggested him as a suspect. When the police searched Milet's home they found a large collection of knives and guns plus ammunition that matched evidence found at camp sites. They also found sleeping bags and clothes which they believed Milet had taken from the victims. The police also established that Milet had (suspiciously) sold his vehicle after the bodies were found and was not at work on any of the days when the victims were believed to have been abducted and killed. This evidence, when stacked up, was all fairly conclusive. Milat was convicted of the murders on 27 July 1996 and was sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences. He died in prison in 2019 at the age of 74. Milet never confessed to any of the murders. Although no evidence has yet proven conclusive, it seems highly plausible that Ivan Milat killed more people than the Australian police are yet aware of.

(30) Gina Phillips was actually in her thirties when she played a college student in the first Jeepers Creepers film.

(31) Wes Craven named Freddy Krueger after a bully who tormented him as a child.

(32) George Romero regretted making Barbara a largely catatonic and passive character in Night of the Living Dead. For the 1990 remake (which Romero wrote), he made Barbara much tougher.

(33) The blood washing away in the shower in Psycho after Janet Leigh's death was actually chocolate sauce. Because the film was in black and white it looked like blood.

(34) There are 60 different types of monster in the film The Cabin in the Woods.

(35) The Yankee Pedlar Inn in the 2012 horror film The Innkeepers is a real haunted hotel. The director (Ti West) of The Innkeepers had actually stayed in his hotel himself and experienced some strange incidents.

(36) Tony Todd had to put real bees in his mouth during the making of the film Candyman.

(37) Adrienne Barbeau is the voice of MacReady's computer chess game in John Carpenter's The Thing.

(38) The actors in Final Destination 3 had to ride the rollercoaster nearly 30 times for the premonition disaster sequence that opens the film.

(39) Scatman Crothers was made to do 85 takes by Stanley Kubrick shooting the scene in The Shining where he shows Wendy and Danny around the food storage areas of the Overlook Hotel.

(40) Tippi Hedren was 33 when she made The Birds for Alfred Hitchcock but the press releases pretended she was 28.

(41) Michael Caine turned down the part of Bob Rusk in Alfred Hitchcock's classic suspense thriller Frenzy because he thought both the part and the script was distasteful. The role was played by Barry Foster instead.

(42) A Nightmare On Elm Street was Johnny Depp's film debut. Depp attended auditions with his friend Jackie Earle Haley and was spotted by director Wes Craven. Haley later played Freddy in the 2010 remake.

(43) The name Ripley in the Alien franchise came from Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Ellen was the producer Walter Hill's mother's middle name - thus Ellen Ripley.

(44) Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is a famously terrible sequel to Joe Dante's werewolf film The Howling. Gary Brandner, the author of the novel on which the first film was based, hated Joe Dante because he felt Dante had ignored most of his book when he made the first film. Consequently, Dante was blocked from having the chance to make a sequel. The sequel was made on the cheap in Prague and directed by Philippe Mora - a mediocre filmmaker who made bad low-budget horror films his stock in trade. All you need to know about Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf is that Christopher Lee had over 250 screen credits in his career and yet singled out this film as the worst one he'd ever appeared in.

Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf doesn't have much to do with the first film. This is a very trashy and cheap looking film that seems to be more of a parody than anything else. It's rather boring though and relies a lot on Sybil Danning in very few clothes to get it through the lulls. Danning plays Stirba, an immortal werewolf queen. Much of the film takes place in dark gloomy settings and there is some god awful new wave music from a band in endless concert scenes. Christopher Lee looks dreadfully embarrassed to be here as the mysterious Stefan Crosscoe and - like the audience - seems to have no idea what is going on. One of the more remarkable things about the film is that they apparently sent the wrong costumes. Instead of werewolf costumes they were sent Planet of the Apes costumes instead and had to make do with them! So, instead of people looking like werewolves, they look like apes instead! It's one of but many things in Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf that don't make much sense. This a terrible sequel that has little to do with the first film and is probably best avoided. Even fans of low-budget eighties horror are likely to have their patience stretched to breaking point by Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf.

(45) Jason Vorhees was originally going to be called Josh. Josh Vorhees doesn't quite have the same ring does it?

(46) The Night Stalker, written by Richard Matheson, was a 1971 television film starring Darren Darren McGavin as a reporter named Cark Kolchak who stumbles into all manner of spooky goings on. It was fondly remembered by many (including Stephen King) and after an excellent sequel called The Night Strangler was later turned into a television series. Night Stalker probably visited the well too many times, becoming rather unrealistic in the end the way that Kolchak kept being drawn into a supernatural or monster themed investigation each week. He also had a knack of losing all of his evidence so no one ever believed him! The original television film though is regarded to be excellent.

(47) It's slightly odd that Freddy Krueger was a child killer who was murdered and now spends his time bumping off teenagers but ended up with a range of toy dolls and a young fanbase!

(48) The "Blair Monster" in the finale of John Carpenter's The Thing required 300 pounds of foam rubber.

(49) The Blair Witch Project was shot in just eight days.

(50) The skin masks and suits that Ed Gein fashioned from his graverobbing activities were the main inspiration for Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films. Gein's unfathomable crimes spawned a number of films (sometimes loosely) based on his exploits - Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, Deranged, In the Light of the Moon (which stars Steve Railsback as Gein). 1974's Deranged stars Roberts Blossom as Ezra Cobb (Cobb is clearly based on Gein), a nutty rural chap who exhumes his mother and begins abducting and killing local women. Deranged is a bit rough around the edges (it plainly didn't have much of a budget) but it's quite an effective little horror film. 2000's In the Light of the Moon is also worth watching. Although hardly a classic, In the Light of the Moon serves as a fairly accurate depiction of Ed Gein's crimes and is always fairly compelling. Ed Gein's unusual home decor and bone and skin themed bric-a-brac was also clearly a big influence on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yes, it's safe to say that Ed Gein has been a big inspiration when it comes to horror films.

(51) The original title for the first Final Destination film was Flight 180.

(52) Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs was partly based on Gary Heidnik. Heidnik was executed in 1999 for the murder, torture, and rape of six women in 1986 and 1987. He would keep the captives prisoner in a pit at the base of his house.

(53) The original concept for Joe Dante's Gremlins was more horrific. The gremlins were originally going to eat Billy's dog and kill his mother.

(54) Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead was banned in Germany until 2016.

(55) There have been over two hundred movies and television shows based on the work of Stephen King.

(56) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre cost less than $300,000 to make and eventually grossed $30 million in the U.S.

(57) There have been more films about Jack the Ripper than any other real life killer. The eclectic band of films and TV shows inspired by the Ripper includes A Study in Terror (an enjoyable 1965 film where Sherlock Holmes attempts to find the Ripper), Hammer's Hands of the Ripper, Murder by Decree (another film which blends fiction and fact by having Sherlock Holmes inhabit the same universe as the Ripper), and endless others - including an Italian-Spanish giallo film based on the notorious murderer. TV hows like Whitechapel and Ripper Street have been inspired by the case. Michael Caine starred in a decent (if TV santised) 1988 Jack the Ripper miniseries and the Ripper has even been transplanted to modern day America in silly films like Jack's Back. If you are interested in Jack the Ripper you must read Alan Moore's brilliant graphic novel From Hell if you haven't done so already. From Hell later inspired a terrible film adaptation with Johnny Depp.

(58) David Warner was the first choice to play Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare On Elm Street. Warner had done his Freddy make-up tests before a scheduling conflict emerged and he became unavailable - thus paving the way for Robert Englund to play the part.

(59) Danny Lloyd, who, as a child actor, played Danny Torrance in The Shining, said that he had no idea he was appearing in a horror film when he shot his scenes. Stanley Kubrick told him they were making a drama about a family who lives in a hotel.

(60) Bruce Campbell had some teeth knocked out while making the original Evil Dead when a cameraman slipped and hit him in the face with his camera.

(61) Duane Jones was the first black actor to play the lead hero in a horror film. This was in George Romero's classic 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Despite the racial subtext of the film, Romero said Duane Jones was cast as the lead because he was the best affordable actor they knew and not because he was black. Duane Jones was later director of the Maguire Theater at the State University of New York at Old Westbury and the artistic director of the Richard Allen Center for Culture and Art in Manhattan.

(62) The original 1958 version of The Fly, a big box-office hit of the era, was shot in just eighteen days.

(63) The 1973 film The Exorcist is one of the most famous horror movies ever made and was a huge blockbuster. The film made a (short lived) star of Linda Blair, who played Regan MacNeil - a twelve year old girl possessed by a demonic spirit. Warners Bros were understandably eager to make a sequel and it arrived in 1977 in the form of Exorcist II: The Heretic. With the acclaimed filmmaker John Boorman in the director's chair and Richard Burton in the cast what could possibly go wrong? Well, everything to be honest. Exorcist II: The Heretic is regarded to be one of the most disastrous sequels ever made. The bizarre premise of Exorcist II: The Heretic has Regan MacNeil now 16 and living with a guardian in New York. Regan has suppressed the memories of the first film and is being treated at a high tech psychiatric institute. She is treated with a "synchronizer" - a device that merges brainwaves. Or something. The scenes of this in operation make the film look like a Gerry Anderson sci-fi show. Richard Burton plays a priest investigating the events of the first film. He naturally seeks out Regan. Exorcist II: The Heretic is a somewhat baffling film that was endlessly cut and re-edited - even as it hit cinemas. The film could not be salvaged though and got terrible reviews. It is just a very strange film full of bewildering creative decisions - like a scene where Linda Blair tapdances.

(64) Jenette Goldstein, who plays the trigger happy tomboy Vasquez in Aliens, turned up for her audition in a skirt and high heels as she had no idea what the film was about or who her character was.

(65) Seth Brundlefly's vomit in David Cronenberg's version of The Fly was made from honey, eggs, and milk.

(66) Mia Farrow was tearfully on the brink of quitting the film Rosemary's Baby at one point to save her marriage to Frank Sinatra. With Rosemary's Baby falling behind schedule, Sinatra wanted her to quit to make a film called The Detective with him and warned the producer Robert Evans in phone calls that he better deliver her on time. To keep his star, Evans showed Farrow an hour of Rosemary's Baby and told her she was on course for an Oscar. A furious Sinatra then had divorce papers delivered on the set but Farrow had her revenge when Rosemary's Baby was a much bigger hit than Sinatra's film. Farrow even suggested to Evans they take out an ad contrasting the box-office figures.

(67) Paul Bateson was a former radiographer who appeared in the famous horror movie The Exorcist (during the hospital scene). Bateson was later a suspect in the case of a serial killer who was never captured. The 'bag murders' was the name given to a spate of killings in New York from 1975 to 1977. There were six murders in all. The victims were cut up before their remains were shoved in a bag and thrown in the Hudson River. As a consequence of this it was impossible to identify the victims and capturing the killer (who is generally known as The Greenwich Village Killer) proved equally complicated. The only lead the police had to go on was to place the clothing found on the remains under scrutiny. They managed to deduce that the victims seemed to be wearing items purchased from leather stores in Greenwich Village - specifically a fetish shop on Christopher Street. The location was a common haunt for the local gay community and so it seemed logical to presume that the victims were gay men.

While this all certainly narrowed down the lines of the investigation the inability to identify the victims was obviously a tremendous hindrance to the police. There was a suspect (of sorts) though in the end when it came to these harrowing murders. The suspect was Paul Bateson. Bateson seemed to fall on hard times after The Exorcist and began drinking a lot. Things got so bad he ended up working in a porno cinema. Bateson was arrested in 1977 for the murder of a reporter named Addison Verrill. Verill covered the film scene for Variety and had been beaten and stabbed in his apartment. The police suspected at the time that it was a robbery and financially motivated. Bateson lived in Greenwich Village and frequented leather bars in the district. He was found guilty of Verrill's murder but during the trial the prosecution alleged that Bateson had confessed to other murders and said that he dismembered his victims and put them in bags. When one added all these details together then Bateson was a pretty strong suspect in the 'bag murders' investigation. The judge at the trial though dismissed the prosecution's attempt to portray Bateson as a serial killer and said the connections between the murder in question and other murders were too vague to be admissible.

Bateson was found guilty of the murder of Addison Verrill but (despite reports to the contrary) he has never confessed to being the person responsible for the bag murders and insists that he is innocent. Bateson apparently got out of prison in 2005. The police simply never had sufficient evidence to build a case against him for the bag murders. Sadly, because it was so long ago and the victims were impossible to identify the true identity of the killer may never be known. It could be that Bateson was The Greenwich Village Killer or it could have been someone else. The case of Paul Bateson loosely inspired the William Friedkin film Cruising. He was also depicted in the David Fincher television show Manhunter.

(68) Jason Statham was supposed to play Cooper in Neil Marshall's werewolf horror film Dog Soldiers but chose to make John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars instead. Kevin McKidd replaced him.

(69) Dennis Radar was the inspiration for the Stephen King story A Good Marriage in his Full Dark, No Stars collection. This story was later turned into a forgettable movie. Radar became known as the BTK killer - BKT meaning bind, torture, kill. Radar, who killed at least ten people, fitted security alarms for a living. He said many people had alarms fitted by him because of their fear of the BTK killer! Radar served in the Air Force as a young man and then got married before he worked in the security alarm business. Rader's family was sort of like the perfect disguise for a killer. Radar was the president of his local Christ Lutheran Church. He walked his daughter down the aisle when she got married. He was bald and wore glasses. You'd never suspect he was secretly a serial killer. He would usually strangle or suffocate (with a plastic bag) his victims. Sometimes he used a gun. One victim was stabbed though. Rader was very ruthless and killed families and children.

(70) The interiors of the hotel in Kubrick's The Shining don't make spatial sense and are designed to disorientate the viewer.

(71) Clive Barker was offered the chance to write and direct Alien 3 but he wasn't interested. Barker said his agent was absolutely furious and they soon parted company.

(72) The Amityville Horror is based on the alleged supernatural experiences of the Lutz family who bought a new home on 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, a house where a mass murder had been committed the year before. After the family moved into their new house, they claimed a series of frightening paranormal events occurred. James Cromarty, who bought the house in 1977 and lived there with his wife Barbara for ten years, said - "Nothing weird ever happened, except for people coming by because of the book and the movie."

(73) Dominique Dunne portrayed Dana Freeling in the 1982 horror film Poltergeist. She had also been cast as Robin Maxwell in the television miniseries V (this popular miniseries was about seemingly humanoid and friendly aliens who come to Earth and turn out to be blood-drinking lizards who want to take over). Dunne was the sister of the actor Griffin Dunne. Her father was the famous journalist Dominick Dunne. Around the time that V was in pre-production and about to start shooting in 1982, Dominique Dunne was 22 and in a relationship with a chef named John Sweeney. This relationship had become quite intense and Dominique Dunne decided she wanted to end it. Sweeney met Dominique Dunne in a residence they used to share and begged for her to give him another chance. She refused to do this and insisted that their relationship was over for good. Sweeney was so enraged by this that he throttled the actress for what was later determined to be at least four minutes in the driveway of the house. Dominique Dunne passed out and was put in a coma. She died in hospital for days later.