Horror stories are more chilling if they come with the promise, "based on a true story"
Horror stories are more chilling if they come with the promise, "based on a true story"
A recurrent theme of the horror genre is that all the scariest tales are based on true stories. From Orson Welles' infamous 1930s radio broadcast of 'War Of The Worlds' which mimicked the news reports of the time, through The Exorcist, which famously drew on 1949 news reports of a haunting in Maryland; to The Blair Witch Project which cleverly adopted the fake documentary format - fans of scary stories love to believe that what they're experiencing is somehow real.
The forthcoming chiller An American Haunting trades heavily on such fears, basing its narrative on tales of the so-called 'Bell Witch' affair from the early 19th century, which earned itself a place in US history books when an old man was officially scared to death. The victim of this alleged infestation was Tom Bell, whose expiry on December 20, 1820 was legally attributed to his lengthy ordeal at the hands of an unclean spirit. To date, the Bell Witch incident remains the only documented case in which a verdict of death by supernatural means has been recognized by American law. Which means it must be true, right?
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