Movies You'd Never Expect To Be Based On A True Story But Are

Sam Raimi is a filmmaker who has made his entire career on the backs of wildly over-the-top and entertaining horror and action films. Whether helming the original "Evil Dead" movie or bringing the first modern live-action version of Spider-Man to the big screen, Raimi infuses all his works with a preposterous energy that looks like it belongs to a different, more colorful dimension. 

That is why the filmmaker feels like an odd choice for "The Gift." The horror movie certainly seems like it should be right in Raimi's wheelhouse, but unlike the zany theatrics of "Evil Dead," "The Gift" is supposed to be based on real events. Billy Bob Thornton, best known for his acting roles, co-wrote the film based on the psychic experiences of his mother. "My mom was a psychic," Thornton told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. "There's a movie called 'The Gift' that I'd written years ago with Cate Blanchett, which is loosely based on my mom." 

In the film, Thornton's mother takes the shape of Annie, played by Blanchett. After receiving some unexpected psychic visions, Annie finds herself being drawn into the orbit of an unsolved murder case and feels compelled to help the police clear up the matter. "The Gift" was a modest success at the box office and drew praise from critics for the performance of the main cast and Raimi's uncharacteristically low-key direction style.   

Slasher horror movies are well-known for going to bizarre lengths to create the next iconic slasher horror villain, whether it is an undead monster like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger. But the "Final Destination" franchise has taken the idea of a powerful and fearsome slasher horror villain to a whole new level.  

The "Final Destination" franchise explores the idea of the literal concept of death acting as a slasher killer, coming up with gruesome ways of taking down characters who somehow previously managed to cheat death. The series sees its main cast of characters being stalked by the invisible but ever-present death until they find themselves losing their lives through a series of horrifying "accidents." The franchise kicks off with the first "Final Destination" movie, which features a plane crash that the main characters manage to narrowly avoid. 

The circumstances of the crash were directly inspired by the tragedy of TWA Flight 800, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on July 17, 1996. "Final Destination" actually borrows real-life footage from the wreckage of the crash and its aftermath, a fact that rubbed at least one person involved with the movie the wrong way. "There was some criticism that the movie was written to exploit this real-life crash," franchise creator Jeffrey Reddick recalled in an interview reported by Den of Geek. "I even realized later they used footage from one real-life crash, which I wasn't particularly happy about."

The main question that most horror filmmakers have to ask themselves right at the start of a fresh project is how they can create a compelling new villain. Sometimes this involves giving the character a distinctive and scary appearance that produces chills in audiences with a single glimpse. Other times, as was the case with "The Blob," the makers decide to go in the opposite direction. 

In a small Pennsylvania town in the 1950s, a meteorite crashes into a hill at night. When a man goes to investigate the alien object, a gelatinous, shapeless creature emerges and fastens onto the man. This is the titular "Blob," and over the course of the movie, it jumps from one victim to another, killing and absorbing their nutrients and growing in size until it threatens the safety of the entire town. 

The look and feel of the main creature from "The Blob" are said to have been inspired by the appearance of a star jelly that showed up in Pennsylvania in 1950. The star jelly's alien appearance was described as "a domed disk of quivering jelly, six feet in diameter, one foot thick at the center and an inch or two near the edge," a description that also applies pretty well to the Blob. The success of the movie spawned an unlikely franchise filled with characters running away in terror from what appears to be a slowly moving tub of lard. 

Action movies from the '80s were famous for not letting realism get in the way of over-the-top bottom-kicking, where a single muscled and well-oiled hero takes on a storm of enemies and hacks them down in short order. Chuck Norris is a prominent hero of that era, and his starring vehicle "The Delta Force" is exactly what you would expect from a Norris film. 

Major Scott McCoy, played by Norris, is a retired U.S. Delta Force operative. Although burned out from dealing with politicians and diplomatic red tape, McCoy has no choice but to return to the field when a group of Palestinian terrorists hijacks a Boeing 707 traveling from Cairo to New York. With time running out, McCoy quickly draws up a plan with his fellow Delta Force operatives to infiltrate the enemy's stronghold and kill everyone and everything that stands in their way. 

Starring an able cast of actors supporting Norris, "The Delta Force" draws inspiration from two real-life incidents: the hijacking of flight 847 by a group of fundamentalist terrorists and Operation Entebbe, which was a counter-terrorist hostage-rescue mission undertaken by members of the Israel Defense Forces at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on July 4, 1976.

Indian cinema is something that viewers in the West have long been aware of but kept at arm's length due to the movies being perceived to be overlong and filled with unnecessary song-and-dance sequences. But the Telugu cinema (Tollywood) action epic "RRR," also known as "Rise Roar Revolt," helped buck that trend by making a huge impression on western critics and audiences.  

In the 1920s, during India's occupation under the British empire, a man called Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) sets out from his local forest area to rescue a little girl belonging to his tribe who had been taken to Delhi by a powerful British family. Warned of Bheem's approach, the British enlist the help of local officer Raju (Ram Charan), who has his own agenda behind siding with the Empire over his own people.   

Imagine the most gloriously over-the-top Hollywood action movie you have ever seen, and multiply that by 100 to gain some understanding of the chaotic grandeur of "RRR," which includes Bheem facing off against a literal tiger, a menagerie's worth of animals attacking British soldiers, a breath-taking dance-off sequence with the very honor of Indian culture at stake, and Bheem and Raju combining to morph into Goro from "Mortal Kombat." Despite the liberties taken with the action and storyline, director S.S. Rajamouli was inspired by the real-life exploits of Indian freedom fighters Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem.    

Few movies have impacted their genre as much as "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" impacted the slasher horror genre. The movie is responsible for many of the tropes that you see in slasher films today, in addition to giving the world one of the most iconic slasher villains of all time in the shape of the chainsaw-wielding maniac Leatherface. 

And yet, the movie was not initially designed to be a typical slasher horror. When director Tobe Hooper co-wrote the screenplay with Kim Henkel, they were following the blueprint of movies like "Psycho" and "The Silence of the Lambs," which are more interested in exploring the psyches of killers than piling up the body count. In their creation of the world of Leatherface and his deranged, cannibalistic family, Hooper and Henkel looked to real-life murderers for inspiration.   

"I definitely studied [Ed] Gein," Henkel explained to Texas Monthly (via Yahoo). "But I also noticed a murder case in Houston at the time, a serial murderer you probably remember named Elmer Wayne Henley." Gein, of course, was one of the most infamous serial killers in the world, known for keeping skin and bone trophies of his victims. This became the founding characterization of Leatherface in Hooper and Henkel's film, and the basis for the character's famous face mask. 

"The Sound of Music" is one of the most iconic Hollywood musicals of all time. It made a star out of its leading actress Julie Andrews in the role of a free-spirited young woman named Maria who is tasked with caring for and teaching the children of the wealthy but strict Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer). The movie's bright songs, characters, and setting are considered comfort food for many viewers. 

Yet, the circumstances behind the creation of the movie were not nearly as sunny. It all began with a 1949 memoir written by Maria Augusta von Trapp titled "The Story of the Trapp Family Singers." The book tells the tale of the von Trapp family, who lived in Salzburg, Austria, before being forced to flee Europe due to the Nazi invasion, making their second home in America as a singing and dancing variety act. 

Many of the incidents mentioned in the memoir are adapted directly for "The Sound of Music." But there are several key differences as well, like how in the book the father is not a stern and aloof parental figure, and his marriage to Maria takes place several years earlier. 

Most genres of cinema, from drama to comedy to horror, can lend themselves to adapting real-life incidents that have happened to people in the real world, but the monster movie genre seems exempt from this rule since it deals with larger-than-life creatures and hundreds of feet tall monsters who obviously have no basis in reality. 

And yet so many of them do. The original "King Kong" movie tells the story of a group of explorers coming across an island that contains giant lizards and an equally huge ape-like creature. While Kong was basically a bigger version of real-life gorillas as imagined by director Merian C. Cooper, the island full of giant lizards also has a basis in reality, being inspired by W. Douglas Burden's book "The Dragon Lizards of Komodo." 

Even the mythology of King Kong's iconic cinematic frenemy Godzilla was directly inspired by the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg kickstarted the whole "giant shark wants to eat everything in the sea" genre with "Jaws," which was inspired by a series of shark attacks in the real world.