Is Serial Mom Based On A True Story?

After nearly 25 years of making extremely provocative and often deliberately hard-to-watch movies, avant-garde filmmaker John Waters began to dabble in work that was much more palatable to mainstream audiences, beginning with 1988's "Hairspray" — the 2007 remake of which we proclaimed to contain James Marsden's greatest movie role. Waters' third film in that era was "Serial Mom," released in 1994 and starring Kathleen Turner as a seemingly mild-mannered suburban housewife who also happens to have the nasty habit of brutally murdering people.

Given its proximity to the HBO film "The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom" — released the year prior and based on a real small-town housewife who was accused of killing a fellow cheerleader squad parent — some people have wondered whether "Serial Mom" was also based on that story. To be fair, the movie does claim in its opening moments to be based on real events and actual eyewitness testimony, with names changed to protect the innocent. But is "Fargo" based on a true story like its opening disclaimer states? Absolutely not — which means movies are free to say that even when it's not actually true. So what does all this mean for "Serial Mom" and its origins? 

Like many John Waters movies, "Serial Mom" is a biting satire of the themes it is depicting. In this case, that means not only movies based on true crime stories, but specifically movies that sensationalize the subjects of those movies in one way or another. It's likely that he had the aforementioned Texas cheerleader mom Wanda Holloway and other similar figures like her in mind when creating Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner), but neither that character nor the movie are directly based on any real people or events.

Also like many of Waters's movies, "Serial Mom" was a box office bomb that became a cult classic. It didn't help that it was released the same year as "Natural Born Killers," another movie about murderers who become the center of a media frenzy that was much flashier and a lot less subtle with its approach than "Serial Mom." It's possible that "Serial Mom" would have resonated more with audiences of today, who are much more obsessed with true-crime stories and frequently make celebrities out of the people at the center of those tales.