Horror Movies Inspired by Real Life

There's an interesting online article about movies, complete with trailers, inspired by real-life events. Some of them I had already heard of. For example, Child's Play was inspired by Robert the Doll, and The Conjuring was based on Annabelle the doll. I've featured both Robert and Annabelle in previous posts. I knew that Psycho was based loosely on convicted killer Ed Gein, but I was not aware of Wes Craven's inspiration for A Nightmare on Elm Street.

If you'd like to check out the article, you'll find the background stories very intriguing.

Past Bram Stoker Award Winner Bentley Little

As promised in my last post, I'll be looking at some past Bram Stoker Award winners (in no particular order) over the next two months. This week's post features the prolific novelist and short story writer Bentley Little. I've read only one of his novels, but it stayed with me, and he's definitely on my "to-read more of" list.

Various biographies of Bentley Little point out that he was born a month after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho. (Is there a horror gene?)

His first novel The Revelation, which he wrote as his M.A. thesis and later published, won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel in 1990. He was also among the Best Novel nominees in 1993 for The Summoning.


In a special issue of Cemetery Dance Magazine devoted to Bentley Little, the author discusses why he enjoys writing horror fiction:

. . . Horror fiction offers an author the broadest possible canvas on which to work. I have all of the real-world subjects at my disposal that a mainstream writer does—plus the infinite realm of the supernatural. Creatively, there's nothing else that comes close to this sort of scope, which is why there is nothing I would rather be than a horror writer.

(from Cemetery Dance Magazine #64)

Little writes in the tradition of Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and he manages to make small towns and seemingly mundane situations (like belonging to a homeowners' association) downright terrifying. Stephen King has described him as "the horror poet laureate".  Little's most recent novel is The Influence, which was published in October 2013.

If you're interested in learning more about Bentley Little and his novels, please visit the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.