Is The Strangers Based On A True Story? (Yes - And It's Terrifying)

Bryan Bertino's 2008 psychological horror movie "The Strangers" tells the story of a regular couple who are targeted by a trio of masked stalkers. The movie combines elements of classic masked killer terror with the primal fear people have of strangers with malevolent intentions and things that go bump in the night. The way the plot refuses to give the titular strangers any true motivation for their elaborate stalking only adds to the eerie atmosphere.

"The Strangers" features zero supernatural entities or creepy monsters, and the unnervingly mundane nature of its threat makes it the kind of movie that can stay with the viewer. It would be tempting to think that Bertino simply managed to dream up a particularly disturbing scenario, but, unfortunately, "The Strangers" is very much based on a true story.

"The Strangers" starts out as a bit of a relationship drama, as James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler) spend the night at the former's old country house after a night at a friend's wedding goes awry. Suddenly, an unknown woman knocks on the door, asking for a person who doesn't live there. After that, the pair start experiencing more and more disturbances caused by three masked people (Laura Margolis, Gemma Ward, and Kip Weeks) who seem to be stalking them with neither rhyme nor reason — save for the fact that James and Kristen simply happen to be there. Predictably enough, the ending of "The Strangers" is far from happy.

The movie explores similar themes of wanton targeting of innocent victims as Michael Haneke's fourth-wall-breaking horror thriller "Funny Games" and goes all in on atmospheric horror. Since "The Strangers" keeps the titular villains deliberately inscrutable and keeps its focus tightly on James and Kristen, its scares come across as far more realistic than most horror movies out there.

The masked stalkers in "The Strangers" are two women and a man who may or may not be a family: "Man in the Mask" (Weeks), "Pin-Up Girl" (Margolis), and "Dollface" (Ward). However, the film's murderous trio was actually inspired by a far more notorious group of real-life killers — the Manson family. In particular, Bryan Bertino's goal was to depict how horrifying and senseless the cult's 1969 murder of Sharon Tate and four other victims must have seemed from the victims' point of view.

"To me, what it ended up being is that I wanted to tell the story of the victims. When I was a kid, I read [Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry's book on Manson family murders] 'Helter Skelter,'" Bertino said in an interview with Shock Till You Drop. "I was thinking about the Tate murders and realizing that these detailed descriptions had painted a story of what it was like in the house with the victims. But none of the victims knew about the Manson family or why it was happening to them. So, I got really fascinated with telling the victims' tale."

This is not the first time filmmakers have based their work on the Manson family, of course. There's no shortage of films based on Charles Manson and the infamous murders he spearheaded, and the ending of "Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood" by Quentin Tarantino famously turns the table on the cultists, courtesy of two-fisted stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). However, by removing the notorious family from the equation and focusing solely on the victims' horror as mysterious assailants target them, "The Strangers" explores a raw, primal fear that goes far beyond what you might experience at any individual homicidal deed.

But wait, it gets worse! As if drawing inspiration from the Manson family murders wasn't enough, "The Strangers" also features elements of two other true stories. Disturbingly, one of them comes from Bryan Bertino's personal experience. In the movie, the very first sign of the terrors to come is when one of the Strangers knocks on the door, and when James answers, she asks for someone named Tamara. A similar event actually happened to Bertino's family when he was young.

"As a kid, I lived in a house on a street in the middle of nowhere," the writer-director revealed in the movie's production notes. "One night, while our parents were out, somebody knocked on the front door and my little sister answered it. At the door were some people asking for somebody that didn't live there. We later found out that these people were knocking on doors in the area and, if no one was home, breaking into the houses. In 'The Strangers,' the fact that someone is at home does not deter the people who've knocked on the front door; it's the reverse."

In addition to this personal experience and the Manson family murders, a horror fan who searches for information on "The Strangers" will most likely bump into a third true story that bears an uncanny resemblance to the movie's events: the Keddie cabin murders. In 1981, multiple unknown killers entered a cabin in Keddie, California, where they gruesomely murdered four people over the course of a single night. The case has never been solved and involves a number of mysterious elements that are even more outlandish than "The Strangers" — such as the fact that three young, unharmed children slept through the entire night in one bedroom without noticing anything.