- Sometimes, truth really is stranger than fiction.
“Based on a true story” is a great tagline, and a lot of movies milk their real-life origins to the extreme. But then there are those movies nobody would guess have some truth to them.
Not that anyone could blame you for not knowing that. Some of these films are so out there that you’d never think they could be based on real events.
Here are X movies you probably didn’t realize are based — at least in part — on a true story. And if you did, congratulations on your film knowledge!
6) The Terminal (2004)
The Terminal is a 2004 comedy-drama by Steven Spielberg, starring an all-star cast of Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Stanley Tucci. In the movie, Hanks plays an eastern European man who gets stuck at the John F. Kennedy Airport in New York after a coup in his home country invalidates his passport.
But The Terminal got its inspiration from a real case that isn’t anywhere near as funny as the movie. In 1977, a man called Mehran Karimi Nasseri fled his home in Iran following anti-government protests.
Along the way, the bag containing his passport got stolen, or so Nasseri claims. Whatever the case, he found himself at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, unable to enter either UK or France.
Nasseri ended up living at the airport for 18 years. In 2006, he fell ill and was taken to a French hospital. Luckily, he got better, but his fortunes didn’t improve otherwise — Nasseri now resides at a French homeless shelter.
5) A Few Good Men (1992)
Even if you haven’t seen A Few Good Men, you will know Jack Nicholson’s famous line: “You can’t handle the truth!” The movie follows the court case surrounding a Marine who died as a result of a brutal hazing ritual.
The real-life case, fortunately, didn’t end in death. But William Alvarado did get beaten until his lungs filled with fluid by 10 of his fellow Marines.
Alvarado survived and testified against his brutalizers, seven of whom got dishonorably discharged. The other three, however, took the case to court, arguing that they’d acted on orders from higher up.
One of the Marines was found dead with a gunshot wound to the head shortly after the trial. To this day, nobody knows who killed him or why.
4) Jaws (1975)
Come on, Jaws has to be pure fiction, right? There aren’t ginormous killer sharks swimming around in the sea, right? Well, yes and no.
Jaws, and the book it’s based on, got their inspiration from the life of Frank Mundus. The man was a shark and whale hunter, who later became a shark conservationist after “big game fishing” was outlawed. Maybe he wanted to make amends.
There’s also another, more chilling, real-life inspiration for Jaws. In 1916, an enormous shark, dubbed the Jersey Shore Man-Eater, killed four Jersey Shore residents.
3) Footloose (1984)
The 1984 musical drama Footloose tells the story of high schoolers trying to overturn a local minister’s ban on dancing so they could attend the prom. And indeed, there’s an eerily similar story from 1979.
Elmore City, Oklahoma, made dancing illegal sometime in the 1800s. The lawmakers at the time, as well as the minister upholding the law in 1979, believed dancing was nothing but Satan’s tool to tempt people to sin.
Long story short, the teens of Elmore city eventually managed to get authorities to overturn the law. No one’s ever directly acknowledged the inspiration, but come on — it’s too similar to be a coincidence.
2) The Blob (1958)
In the horror classic The Blob, the titular amorphous monster arrives on Earth in a meteor and proceeds to absorb everything from cows to people. Surely this kind of a story can’t have any connection to reality?
Well, we wouldn’t be listing it if it didn’t. In 1950, a group of policemen in Philadelphia supposedly encountered the real blob.
The cops claimed they saw a squirming purple blob decent from the sky onto a remote field. The thing was, according to its witnesses, some six feet in diameter, filled with crystals, and emitted a strange mist.
As one of the cops called for backup, another approached the blob. As he touched it, the thing reportedly dissolved and evaporated in an instant.
Neither the other officers or the FBI ever found any evidence of the blob having ever existed. And maybe that’s for the better.
1) Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Here’s another legendary horror flick that you wouldn’t think could possible be true. And it’s true — you don’t have to worry about Freddy Krueger showing up on your street.
But the movie, featuring a young Johnny Depp, is indeed inspired by two real-life events. The first one was a drunken man the director Wes Craven saw behind his window as a young child.
The second inspiration, however, is much more gruesome. For some inexplicable reason, the Cambodian refugees escaping Pol Pot’s tyranny in the ‘70s and ‘80s started dropping dead in their sleep.
The deaths were due to a real condition, which we now know as the Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome. But at the time, nobody knew what was going on.
There’s a famous story of a young man who refused to sleep after seeing his friends die around him. After several days of staying awake, fueled by coffee and fear, he finally fell asleep — and died.
Craven put these two events together, and that’s how we ended up with Freddy.