Horror movies have a way of crawling under your skin, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.

But some haunting on-screen stories are truly chilling because their plots were inspired by disturbing true events, eerie coincidences, and inexplicable mysteries.

From the 2010s’ The Conjuring franchise to the 1980s classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, these 20 horror films prove that sometimes the scariest stories aren’t imagined, they’re relived.

The 1973 horror masterpiece The Exorcist remains one of the most terrifying films ever made. The story, adapted from William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, was inspired by the possession of a 14-year-old boy known under the pseudonym Roland Doe. In the late 1940s, Roland, who lived in Maryland, began experiencing strange and violent phenomena soon

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