Truth Scarier than Fiction

     When people see Terry O' Quinn Lost usually comes to mind. When I saw him on Lost, The Stepfather came to mind. There's two of these movies, The Stepfather and The Stepfather II ,both were made in the eighties and were your standard slasher horror/thriller depending on your preference. I consider it a horror because it's like having an invader emerge when someone outside the bloodline not only tries to take complete control, but murders when he doesn't get his way, almost like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. The movies were good enough that a remake of the first one was done in 2009. I always liked them but thought them kind of goofy because of how crazy the character got over family values. Little did I know it's basis was from true crimes.


My reaction to the special features showing it was based on true events.





          Re-watching this on DVD with my girlfriend (to scare her), I decided to watch the special features since I never saw anything on this film before.  What I found out was that the film was based on the true crimes of John List, a New Jersey man that killed his whole family in a nineteen room mansion.  He apparently had strong family values and saw himself and his family falling from grace.  His solution for this was to kill them and start over.  The thing that made me most surprised was that we had rode our bikes in the area it happened last year, right past where this all took place.  The movie came out in 1987 and he was apprehended in 1989 for the murders he committed in 1971.  He was "Stepfathering" it up the whole time until an episode of America's Most Wanted broadcast the unsolved case with a bust of what he would look like given the time that had passed since the murders.  I had read that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the character of Hannibal Lecter were also based on Ed Gein or other real life psycho's.  I wonder if there's something wrong with us watching these films as entertainment while these wicked nut jobs hurt so many people?  Regardless, a movie I thought of as a goofy horror flick from the 80's just got creepy in my book.