I'm Tired of Movies "Based On True Stories"

Hollywood exaggerates stories. Exaggeration is what sells. Clearly, this is the case when labeling films as “based on true events”, “inspired by actual event”, and the like. After researching films for this post, I learned you can label any movie as true.

For example, The Fourth Kind (2009), a movie marketed as not only being based on actual events, but showing real interviews and footage. The movie depicted alien abductions occurring in Nome, Alaska from the 1960s to 2000s and played interviews from the real victims alongside the dramatized version played by the actors in the movie. This sounds incredibly intriguing until you discover that those “real” videos and “real” victims were actually fake videos portrayed by actors, and extraterrestrial encounters had nothing to do with the Nome disappearances.

I ran across the same issues with The Visitant (2014), a film that I had hopes for considering it had won awards and was based off the events of its own executive producer. Most of her interview on the matter revolves around how the paranormal activity affected her daughter and dog, and how the ghost followed her home after working on The Queen Mary. When I watched the movie, it neglected to add any of these elements to the film, only including small occurrences, such as voices and odd electrical phenomenon, which could be attributed to any paranormal activity.

Lastly, in my quest to find a good true event horror film, I decided to watch The Quiet Ones (2014), a film based on The Philip experiment, which analyzed the possibility that paranormal activities were manmade, being produced from the negative energy given off by a person. The Quiet Ones kept that principle in the film, but then suddenly threw it out the window at the end, attributing the paranormal occurrences to a clairvoyant young girl. At this point, I stopped looking for more movies.

Aside from The Fourth Kind, The Visitant, and The Quiet Ones barely resembling the events in which they are supposed to be based, the liberties these movies took with their origins didn’t save the films from being terrible, in my opinion. None of them scared me even the slightest bit, which is saying something for a person like me who scares easily, and their plots were boring.  

I get why these movies are made. A scary movie becomes even scarier if you can believe it to happen in real life, so why not label as such. The problem is that I could do that for any movie. Every single movie in existence contains elements that have happened in someone else’s life. Nevertheless, does labeling a movie as being true really improve ticket sales or improve their story? Some of the highest grossing horror films contain plots not based on actual events, including The Others (2001), The Haunting (1999), The Ring (2002), and The Grudge (2004), just to name a few. These movies could have claimed inspiration from any number of real occurrences and stamped itself as a true story, but they don’t need to. On the other hand, films like The Fourth Kind appear to latch onto the true story brand to compensate for poor storytelling. All I can say is for these “true story” horror films, most of them need all the help they can get.