‘The Strangers’ is Inspired by This Terrifying Murder Cold Case
Horror movies have a kind of rotten history of pantomiming as true stories when they’re really anything but. Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, peripherally, bears some resemblance to the case of Ed Gein, but marketing it as based on true events was questionable at best, and incredulous at worst. For years, I thought Wolf Creek really happened. I’m not thrilled it got an F CinemaScore, but I kind of get it. Being duped never feels good. Our own Tyler Doupé even exposed five modern classics that operate under the auspices of reality despite being largely fictional. Often, the “truth” amounts to “people have been murdered before, and people are murdered in this movie, ergo, it’s true.” Yet, while Tyler spotlights Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers as a fraudulent true story, it’s surprisingly closer to reality than most of its ilk.
The Strangers pulls from several different real-life cases. Bertino himself has remarked that the screenplay was broadly inspired by both the Manson family murder of Sharon Tate and a series of break-ins he experienced in his neighborhood growing up. Which, as a brief aside—stop making horror movies about the Manson murders.
Also Read: Lock Your Doors, ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ Trailer Has Arrived [Watch]
Yet, while The Strangers never conceptually culled from it, the movie actually bears a fair bit of resemblance to a terrifying, unsolved murder case—the Keddie Cabin Murders. On the night of April 11, 1981, into the early morning hours of April 12, Sue Sharp, Tina Sharp, John Sharp, and family friend Dana Wingate were murdered in their house at the Keddie Resort. Tina’s body was discovered years later when her bones were discovered in April 1984. While new DNA evidence has been discovered as recently as 2016, to this day, the case remains unsolved.
The case continues to attract attention on account of its innate mystery. While forensic investigators have some semblance of an idea of how the murders occurred, too many questions remain unanswered. There’s the innately chilling fact, of course, that several more people might have been killed had they not been serendipitously absent from the home, spending the night with friends in other cabins. Additionally, three young children were asleep in the home when the brutal killings took place. And the killings themselves were especially vicious. Notably, three of the victims—Sue, John, and Dana—had been bound with tape and electrical wire before they were killed.
The Strangers endures today because of its austere hybrid of slasher sensibilities and random nihilism. There is no reason behind Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James’ (Scott Speedman) attack. They were simply home at the wrong time. Absent concrete answers—there have been several suspects over the years, but no firm convictions—the Keddie Murders frighten in much the same way. The Strangers is terrifying enough, but within the context of real events, it might just be one of the scariest movies ever made.
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