'The film you are about to see is based upon documented fact ... Although these crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes.' Introduction to Ilsa -- She Wolf of the SS (1974)

Most of us prefer fiction to fact. So when filmmakers make spurious claims that their movie is 'based on' a true story, you can bet that 'historical accuracy' doesn't enter in to it. Entertainment, that's the key (not forgetting covering your ass in case of litigation). Hence the existence of Ilsa -- She wolf of the SS, the story of Ilse Koch -- 'The Bitch of Buchenwald' -- whose career as head torturer at a Nazi concentration camp is lovingly told in this 70s exploitation flick. Ilsa's favourite pastimes include electrocution, castration and strangulation. And would you know it? It's all true.

This sick but strangely compulsive little film was produced by exploitation master Dave Friedman. Like so many cheapie flicks of this nature, the events in She Wolf, although difficult to stomach, keep us watching because ... well ... it really happened. Didn't it? And even though it's hard to defend, at least you can say that Ilsa gets her comeuppance at the end. 'The Bitch' is butchered, the prisoners escape, everyone's happy.

Look more closely, though, and you begin to understand that, as with a stage magician's best tricks, you've been well and truly had. For a start, nearly all the women in the prison camp are beautiful; the guys aren't exactly wimps either. The tortures themselves are worryingly graphic and the camera dwells upon them with obvious relish. But it's Ilsa herself you have to question. Like did she really use male prisoners to satisfy her insatiable sexual appetites -- and then if they failed to measure up, castrate them? It's unlikely. Why? Because in real life she was butt-ugly!

Films based on real events have always been popular. Whether these are commercial hits like The Elephant Man, Goodfellas or the recent Sleepers or whether they are genre-related -- The Last House On The Left, Dr.Crippen or the aforementioned Ilsa -- they all have a common strand: to entertain. Nothing more, nothing less.

If a movie fails to engage the viewer it will ultimately lose money. The producer does not want this, nor do the backers. When someone proposes making a film based on a true story their agenda is not to educate; it's unlikely that they want to portray somebody in a favourable light; and it's almost certain that factual accuracy is as unimportant to a filmmaker as an original script. No, these are the domain of the documentary, the territory of the true crime book. Real life is boring. Films are a relief from reality; they do not support good causes.

Whereas mainstream movies based on true events tend to avoid controversy horror films actively exploit it. And that's the difference between a big-bucks picture like Schindler's List (itself the biopic of Nazi sympathiser Oskar Schindler) and an exploitation cheapie such as Ilsa -- the former tones down the atrocities, whilst the latter relies upon shock value to pull in the punters.

The more outrageous and shocking a case, the more likely it is that someone will make a film about it. The words 'based on' -- however loosely they refer to the film's content -- have a certain appealing quality. Why, for example, would anyone want to make a movie based on a serial killer? Surely the events are just too painful for all concerned, not to mention downright sordid in some cases. So why?

Perhaps it saves time on writing completely fresh scripts. Why not just make a film about something that really happened? Yet there are no shortage of screenplays out there. So maybe a film is an opportunity to tell the story of a victim or series of events as they should be told. No way! Films are mere diversions -- they're not made to illuminate the truth.

Actually I think the main reason is to fool us into believing that a film has been made to tell the true story and by doing so provoke our sympathies. The 'Wow! This really happened?!' mentality. Except, of course, any self-respecting horror fan will recognise the ploy and will be as likely to greet the 'based on' moniker with a groan as with an exclamation of delight. As we all know, in horror films morbid curiosity and sick humour are much more important than education. No gore spells 'BORE'!

So it's hardly surprising to discover that some of the most prominent 'based on' horror movies utilise murder cases as a primary source of material. And that foremost amongst these is the serial killer movie.

One case that has caught the attention of several filmmakers is that of the 'The Wisconsin Ghoul', Ed Gein. His was a sensational case in the 50s. Gein was a handyman who lived on a farm in Wisconsin. Not the most intelligent of mass murderers, when Gein was questioned in relation to the disappearance of an elderly tavern owner, Mary Hogan, his reply was typical of the stupidity of so many real life criminals: 'She isn't missing,' he said, 'she's at the farm right now.'

Three years after this another disappearance, this time of hardware store owner Mrs. Worden, heralded a visit by the sheriff to Gein's farm. Gein then protested he was being framed for Mrs. Worden's death, an incredulous admission seeing that nobody had mentioned her by name! Inside Gein's woodshed, hanging from the crossbeam, was found the naked corpse of a woman who had been gutted like a fish; her head was missing. As were her genitals. There were piles of rubbish everywhere, loads of horror comics, not to mention human skulls and a chair seat, lampshade and even a shirt made out of human skin. There were also assorted shrunken heads (including Mary Hogan's). Ten other corpses were discovered which Gein admitted he had dug out of the local graveyard.

So with subject matter as distasteful as this it's a wonder anyone had the audacity to make a movie about the case. But they did. Several in fact.

One of the most famous of these is Hitchcock's 1960 classic, Psycho. Psycho doesn't use the 'based on' scenario; it doesn't need to. It's neither a lurid exploitation shocker nor a faithful recounting of the facts behind the case. It's just a very scary, well made movie, the plot of which should be familiar to any serious film fan. Psycho is based on Robert Bloch's novel of the same name which in turn utilises several elements of the Gein case for maximum literary effect.

For instance, the fact that Gein's mother -- Augusta -- had been a religious crank meant that he was to become something of a mother's boy. Gein was nervous of women because of the strictness of his upbringing (Augusta preached that the world was full of wicked women in short skirts with too much lipstick -- know what she means!). He subsequently nursed his mother when she had a stroke until she died in 1945.

Psycho, the movie, incorporated this element of the real life killer's psyche into the tense story of lonely motel owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), who believes his mother is still alive (and she is -- inside his head) and that she -- and not him -- is responsible for the murder of a recently arrived female guest (played by Janet Leigh). The film wisely ignores the more heinous aspects of the Gein case instead concentrating on the nervous but likeable man so ably portrayed by Perkins.

And this is where facts part company from fiction. Ed Gein was a thin, small man. Perkins is tall and good-looking. Gein was scared of women and unattractive to them. In the film, the character played by Janet Leigh is by no means repulsed by Bates. Gein was obsessed by sex and, sure enough, in the film, Bates is seen spying on Leigh through the wall as she takes a shower. But Gein lived on a farm not in a motel. And the only two women he ever murdered were both as elderly as his mother. In film, however, youth and not old age holds the most appeal for an audience. Thus of the few murders we witness, one is that of an attractive woman in her thirties.

Other films inspired by (a catch-phrase as overworked as 'based on') the Gein affair were Deranged and the much better known, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (both 1974). In critic John McCarty's words, Texas bears no resemblance to the case 'except for the bone and flesh-littered farmhouse and the cannibalism of the killers.' Yet there are other similarities. Gein's sexual obsession led him to dig up corpses necessitating several trips to the graveyard over a period of ten years. Whilst there's no hint of the presence of corpses in the cannibal household (if you don't count granddad who, most of the time he's on-screen, seems deader than dough), there are a few prominent shots of graveyards (check out the creepy opening) and although no one is actually eaten in the movie, there is the suggestion that one of the unfortunate victims of the crazy family is on the menu when she is callously placed, alive and screaming, on a giant meathook. Gein did eat parts of the corpses he dug up; he also wore waistcoats made out of their skin. In Texas Chainsaw, the main cannibal killer is Leatherface, so named because he wears a mask made of the skin of his victims.

Other murderers and their squalid crimes have been the inspiration for several 'true-life' movies of varying quality. The nadir of this sordid assortment include crap like Tobe Hooper's Death Trap, based on the real-life murderer Joe Ball who fed his victims to his pet alligators! Then there's the infamous The Toolbox Murders which contains a voice-over/caption that expects us to believe that the film's grisly murders -- including the nail-gunning of a girl in the head and stomach as she masturbates in the bathtub!- actually happened. Sure. About as likely as Disney adapting Nekromantik.

Others in a similar vein include The Last House On The Left (1972) (whose claim that 'the names have been changed to protect those still alive' is misleading as the film's real inspiration was Ingmar Bergman's 1959 film The Virgin Spring); Don't Answer The Phone (1980) (inspired by the LA Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono); and the recent Heavenly Creatures (1994), the brilliant Peter Jackson movie, based on the real-life case of teenagers Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme whose close relationship led to their committing a murder.

Also of note are Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer (1990) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). Henry in particular is an extremely well made film based on the American serial killer Henry Lee Lucas (and his accomplice Ottis Toole) who confessed to over 360 murders. This grim and very downbeat picture avoids exploiting its subject matter and instead concentrates on portraying a highly disturbed individual and his relationship with his troubled girlfriend Becky Powell (in reality Ottis's niece).

Director John McNaughton made a superb picture which, for the most part, avoids putting the actual murders on screen. By viewing events from the killers' point of view, the audience is shown the degradation and squalor of the their lifestyle, helped no end by a grainy, almost video-diary-feel to proceedings. A more damning cinematic indictment of real-life violence it would be difficult to find.

Inspired by the cannibal Sawney Bean family that preyed on travellers in 17th-century Scotland, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes is an occasionally entertaining feature which unfortunately only picks up when the family mutt (the family in question having the misfortune to break down in a part of the desert occupied by deranged murderers) makes a Lassie-style rescue and sees off the pesky cannibals in fine, jaw-frothing style. By no means the classic it's made out to be, it is nevertheless an above average example of the gory survival movie (the mainstream equivalent being 1976's Survive! and 1993's Alive where the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes eat themselves in order to see another day). But make no mistake, Hills adapts its subject matter very loosely indeed, the film's agenda being gory thrills -- with the added interest that something vaguely similar happened for real.

Sometimes literary sources provide the best material when adapting case histories to the big screen. For example, Craven's far superior The Serpent And The Rainbow (1988) is based upon the book by Wade Davis which describes the fascinating account of one man's investigation into Haiti voodoo practices and the discovery of a powder that induces temporary paralysis in its victims. A well adapted tale full of atmosphere and scary images -- in particular the scene where the hero, played by Bill Pullman, wakes up in a coffin six foot under, a giant spider on his face and unable to do a thing about it due to the fact that his obsessive search for the powder has led to someone using it on him!

Whether what happens in the film happened in reality is open to debate. But the final quarter of the picture, full as it is of outrageous special effects, ensures that fact quickly gives way to outright fabrication.

Similarly, Jay Anson's non-fiction book The Amityville Horror spawned the successful film of the same name in 1979, not to mention a whole raft of terrible sequels. The book recounts a malevolent haunting, specifically that of a young American couple who move to a new house and eventually discover its unpleasant history (a number of murders that were committed several years previously). It didn't really matter that the case was horse-shit. What we had was a creepy, well made if occasionally hackneyed, haunted house movie. It was lucrative for the filmmakers -- especially with the sequels -- and even though the case was later discredited, it could have happened.

The Hammer studios especially were fond of turning literary efforts into grandiose gothics. Their 1970 Countess Dracula was inspired by Valentine Penrose's book The Bloody Countess and tells the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, the 17th-century Hungarian noblewoman who bathed in the blood of virgins in an attempt to retain her youth. Hammer's take on the legend is, in reality, not all that engaging and is closer in spirit to the studio's She (1965) using, as it does, the scenario that if the Countess misses a blood-bath (see She's flames of eternal youth) she will wither to an ancient crone quicker than you can say 'Avon calling!'

Indeed, one of the Hammer's most successful cinematic characters -- Dracula -- is himself the creation of novelist Bram Stoker who in turn nicked the idea from the real life case of the 15th-century Transylvanian nobleman Vlad Tepes or Vlad The Impaler so named because he delighted in impaling those who displeased him on long wooden stakes.

A popular Hammer film based on an actual person was 1966's Rasputin -- The Mad Monk. It has been criticised in the past for lacking authenticity, but how much of what is portrayed on-screen actually parallels this real life Russian figure? Hammer's movie turns the legend of Rasputin (real name Grigori Yefimovitch) into a slick and typically gothic horror movie; but in reality things were far less melodramatic. Rasputin gained the reputation of being a holy man due to his gifts of hypnosis and spiritual healing. He was never a monk but did spend three months in a monastery. What the film gets right is that Rasputin was sexually promiscuous. What it fails to point out is that he had his good side too -- which included being a pacifist and an opponent of anti-Semitism.

The plots against Rasputin's life began when the aristocracy began to resent his influence at court. In the film this is well documented as Rasputin exerts considerable influence over the Tsarinain in the Imperial Palace (he had already cured the three year-old Prince of an internal haemorrhage in 1907 -- an event also staged in the movie). So when, on the 16th of December 1916, Prince Felix Yousoupoff invited Rasputin to his home on the pretext of meeting his wife, it was not to eat dinner and talk about politics. Yousoupoff and his three conspirators spiked wine and cakes with cyanide (in the film it's chocolates). However, these had no effect. It was only then that Yousoupoff and his friends used other means to dispatch Rasputin, namely shooting, kicking, beating him on the head and, finally, dumping him through the ice into the river.

If ever there was a case of facts being stranger than fiction, then this is it. Hammer's interpretation is a fine, visually stunning and brilliantly acted piece (Christopher Lee is superb as Rasputin), which sticks closely to the facts to make a sensational drama out an even more hard-to-believe story. The film shows us how hard it was to kill Rasputin but what perhaps is not so well known is that an autopsy showed he was still alive after he entered the water. Also he genuinely appeared to possess healing ability to which may be added the gift of precognition. After his death papers were found predicting his own violent demise at the hands of aristocrats before 1st January 1917 along with the prediction that the royal family would perish within two years. They were all murdered by the Bolsheviks on 16th July 1918.

The ultimate extension of the 'based on' scenario is, I suppose, the so-called 'snuff' movie. These, the media would have it, are not films based on real life but actually are real life. Whereas it's obvious to anyone with at least one brain cell that the infamous Snuff (1974) is patently phoney (not to mention inexorably bad), it's easy to understand how such a notion might arise. A film such as Cannibal Holocaust (1979) certainly seems real. Again it's down to that grainy, jerky camera-feel. The dual narrative only serves to cement this feeling -- that what you're watching is too close to the real thing for comfort.

But it isn't real. It's down to a talented director and film crew making fiction seem fact, myth mimic reality. In the same way, when filmmakers make movies that claim authenticity, then one has to take it all with a pinch -- nay a tumbler -- of salt. Nor is their intention to tell us what really happened. Even the big-budget mainstream films can't help but romanticise, thus coating their efforts in saccharine to make the pill easier to swallow. Just look at tosh like Lorenzo's Oil, for instance. Movie-makers can't afford to take risks. Profits rule!

'Course, if you believe all that baloney then you also believe that the real life Ilsa was a 36DD blonde beauty who used 12" dildos to test the pain threshold of her female prisoners. And I'm not having that!

Originally appeared in Samhain, issue 60, February/March 1997