Who it (almost) Killed: Ashley Murray
In the months after the release of Scream, dozens of murders were reported to have been perpetrated by attackers wearing the movie’s iconic mask. Ashley Murray stands out because of the sheer irony of his near-death. In the opening scene of Scream (spoiler alert to both of the people who don’t know this) Drew Barrymore is terrified by the killers as they talk to her on the phone. They brutally disembowel her boyfriend, and then hang her from a tree by her own entrails. The most chilling part is how her parents arrive home just seconds too late to save her.
In the months after the release of Scream, dozens of murders were reported to have been perpetrated by attackers wearing the movie’s iconic mask. Ashley Murray stands out because of the sheer irony of his near-death. In the opening scene of Scream (spoiler alert to both of the people who don’t know this) Drew Barrymore is terrified by the killers as they talk to her on the phone. They brutally disembowel her boyfriend, and then hang her from a tree by her own entrails. The most chilling part is how her parents arrive home just seconds too late to save her.
Daniel Gill and
Robert Fuller donned the infamous Scream masks, and attempted to do something
similar to Murray,
stabbing him no fewer than 18 times, then leaving the young boy for dead. Murray,
suffering from stab wounds across almost his entire body, a punctured lung and
hypothermia, showed Drew Barrymore that a man named Ashley could be several
millions of times tougher than a girl named Drew. He crawled to a nearby
road and survived for 40 long hours before being found by a man walking his
dog. He even had the strength to testify in court a few months
later. If only Scream had been populated by men like Ashley instead of
veritable fleshy pincushions, maybe we wouldn’t have had to sit through the
sequels.
The Matrix
Who it Killed: 10
people in DC in 2002, among others.
Lee Boyd Malvo,
better known as one half of the DC Sniper team, was apparently obsessed with
the Matrix. Combined with what might be considered more legitimate
outrage at racial injustice and inequality, he became convinced that he was
trapped inside of a hostile system that he thought needed a liberal application
of homicidal insanity.
But Malvo wasn’t the only one “inspired” by this movie. In what has quite seriously become known as “The Matrix Defense”, at least three other murderers have attempted to use this movie along with a combination of schizophrenia as part of an insanity plea. The lawyers to a 27-year-old Swiss exchange student who dismembered his landlady, and a 36-year-old bartender who shot her landlady, both were able to use their defendant’s obsession with the movie to gain insanity pleas.
But Malvo wasn’t the only one “inspired” by this movie. In what has quite seriously become known as “The Matrix Defense”, at least three other murderers have attempted to use this movie along with a combination of schizophrenia as part of an insanity plea. The lawyers to a 27-year-old Swiss exchange student who dismembered his landlady, and a 36-year-old bartender who shot her landlady, both were able to use their defendant’s obsession with the movie to gain insanity pleas.
The Passion of the
Christ
Who it Killed:
Peggy Law, a local respected newswoman.
A former ABC news
employee and apparently all-around nice lady Peggy Law dropped dead during a
showing of Passion of the Christ. Apparently the somewhat baffling
decision to take the wholesome story of Jesus and turn it in to one of the
bloodiest movies of the decade was too much for Law to handle. During the
crucifixion scene, Law suffered a heart attack and died almost
immediately. Strangely, while people still scream to high heaven about
the non-existent deaths that were supposed to have occurred in theaters during
showings of The Exorcist as proof of its evil, no one seemed to think that a
sudden death and a goddamn bolt of lightning were enough to signal God’s
disapproval with this movie.
The Basketball
Diaries
Who it Killed:
Barry Dale Loukaitis’s Algebra teacher and two students.
Loukaitis was a
troubled youth that suffered from severe mood swings. Unfortunately, in
addition to this he also was possessed of a massive superiority complex. While for most middle schoolers this usually results in a severe case of
Watching Anime and Talking About how People Just Don’t “Get” Japan, in 14
year old Loukaitis it combined with his insanity until he felt nothing but
murderous rage toward his fellow students. Quoting Stephen King’s Rage
and The Basketball Diaries, he entered his fifth period algebra class armed
with three guns and shot his teacher and two students. He held the
remaining students hostage before being subdued by a gym teacher. While,
like most people on this list, Loukaitis most likely would have caused damage
with or without The Basketball Diaries, now he’s forever known as that kid who
had to use such lame quotes as “This sure beats algebra, doesn’t it?” while
performing the unthinkable.
Avatar
Who it Killed:
A 42-year-old Taiwanese man
While watching a
showing of Avatar in Taiwan,
a 42-year-old man apparently fell ill because he became - and this is an actual
quote from a real doctor - he became “over-excited”. He slipped in to a
coma shortly thereafter and died 11 days later. What the hell is up with
this movie?
There are plenty of
better, more interesting movies that transport you to a beautiful, romantic
alternate world that haven’t led to deaths and suicidal thoughts. Did not
enough people watch The Lord of the Rings for this sort of thing to become
newsworthy? This is a movie made by James Cameron, a man who put boobs on
Neytiri because he knew people wouldn’t want to be a part of the world if the
hot alien chicks didn’t have boobs. Not to infer that it’s possible to
just “get over” a stroke as in this man’s case, but to the rest of you: get
over it.
Queen of the Damned
Who it Killed:
Thomas McKendrick
McKendrick was
a normal guy who had the unfortunate luck of being friends with Alan Menzies,
who was not a normal guy. Menzies was fantastically insane. After
watching Queen of the Damned for the first time with McKendrick, Menzies begged
to borrow it. He then proceeded to watch this terrible, terrible movie more
than 100 times over the next few months, sometimes watching it as often as 3
times a day. Menzies became obsessed with Aaliyah’s character Akasha - a
millennia old vampire, claiming that she visited him at night and offered to
grant him immortality if he killed for her.
One night,
McKendrick told Menzies that he was crazy. According to Menzies, he insulted
Akasha. Menzies bludgeoned McKendrick to death, stabbed him repeatedly,
drank his blood, and ate half his head. He later killed himself in
prison, hopefully signaling the last time anyone anywhere will have to hear
about Queen of the Damned.
Twilight
Who it Killed: A
transient who wandered in to the 6pm showing.
This is the part
where the obligatory “I bet he died because the movie was so BAD!” joke usually
goes. Now that we have that over with, we can move onto the vague
facts. As far as reports on the internet can say, a man bought a ticket
to the 6pm showing, went and saw it alone, and died some time during the
film. Initially, police were unable to determine why the man died. An autopsy was scheduled, after which the police commented that - aside from the
whole grown man alone watching Twilight thing - his death was “not suspicious”,
and then… that’s it. There’s nothing else on the story that pops up in
Google searches or even searches of the news outlets that originally reported
the story. It’s as if this indigent man suddenly vanished in the night to
become the newest, most smelly version of the Cullen clan.
Taxi Driver
Who it Killed:
Almost two presidents
Because how we
distinguish (or fail to distinguish) fantasy from reality is so relevant to the
topic at hand, perhaps a quick neurology primer on what goes on in your brain
when you watch a movie: put very simply, your brain starts firing as if you
were acting out what you are watching. While it sounds very
science-fiction, it’s actually just how our brains work on a day to day
basis. We don’t hear the words a storyteller says; those words simply
signal parts of our brain to light up, allowing us to imitate the story all
within our cerebral cortex. With movies, it just happens to be that much
more realistic.
In most people, these copycat neurons often evoke empathy before anything else, and our higher brain function brings to a screeching halt anything it’s able to tell is false. The problem comes when you are a schizophrenic like John Hinckley and that higher brain resembles Swiss cheese. Physically incapable of putting a halt to a runaway imagination, Hinckley became obsessed with Jodie Foster, who plays an adolescent prostitute in the movie. He was convinced that, like De Niro, the only way he could become noticed by her or society at large was to go on a mad killing spree. After planning to kill Jimmy Carter and having a more sane friend tell him that would be “just too easy it’s sad”, Hinckley pulled a gun on the old Gipper. Reagan survived, and Hinckley became the poster child of the insanity plea. Not to be outdone, Reagan retaliated by slashing funding for mental hospitals and homeless shelters.
In most people, these copycat neurons often evoke empathy before anything else, and our higher brain function brings to a screeching halt anything it’s able to tell is false. The problem comes when you are a schizophrenic like John Hinckley and that higher brain resembles Swiss cheese. Physically incapable of putting a halt to a runaway imagination, Hinckley became obsessed with Jodie Foster, who plays an adolescent prostitute in the movie. He was convinced that, like De Niro, the only way he could become noticed by her or society at large was to go on a mad killing spree. After planning to kill Jimmy Carter and having a more sane friend tell him that would be “just too easy it’s sad”, Hinckley pulled a gun on the old Gipper. Reagan survived, and Hinckley became the poster child of the insanity plea. Not to be outdone, Reagan retaliated by slashing funding for mental hospitals and homeless shelters.
The Deer Hunter
Who it Killed: Lots
and lots of stupid people
While most of the
movies on this list gave some already homicidal crazy person the extra gravitas
to justify their acts with twisted logic, the Deer Hunter did what Humphrey
Bogart did for cigarettes: it made self-destruction cool. Cases of death
by roulette popped up in the news for years, supposedly inspired by the Deer
Hunter. Though to a certain extent, it’s difficult to feel sorry for
someone who watched a movie in which Russian Roulette was a bellowing metaphor
for the constant hovering of our own mortality and that awareness shatters a
man’s psyche and thinks “Man that is bad. ass.”
Porn
Who it Killed:
British Nanny Nicola Paginton
Awesome as orgasms
are and for all their long-term health benefits, while a person is actually
doing the deed, a lot of stress is put on their system. Similar to how
heart attacks are more likely right after rapid activity, sex and/or
masturbation can cause death as surely as a brisk jog. Paginton, who most
likely had some sort of pre-existing condition, or was just extremely unlucky,
and fell victim to the raw excitement of the most…stimulating type of movie out
there.
Much like how the
Taiwanese man mentioned earlier died while getting “over excited” at alien
boobs, a movie that is too good can literally kill you. Sleep tight
though; the relative stress placed on the body by sex or masturbation is
unlikely to kill you - or else we’d all be going around calling orgasms some sort
of mini-death. Oh wait, we do.
American Psycho
Who it Killed:
A 14-year-old Miami boy
Michael Hernandez
was your average adolescent boy who idolized comic book heroes like Superman,
as well as serial killers like Hannibal Lector and Patrick Bateman - the star of
American Psycho. Unlike most kids who want to be like their heroes,
Hernandez wasn’t normal enough to try and fly off the roof and break his
ankle. Instead he murdered a fellow classmate. Hernandez, whose
parents testified was insane well before the murder, was most likely just
another troubled maniac who wasn’t caught before things turned ugly. On the
bright side, I hear they let you listen to Huey Lewis and the News in prison.
Patch Adams
Who it Killed: The
thousands who die because they got pulled in to the real “Patch Adam’s” bullshit
medicine.
At the end of this
movie, it seems to infer that “Patch” Adams opened the Gesundheit institute,
practiced medicine for free to people, and used good cheer to lift their
spirits while saving their lives. In reality, the Gesundheit Institute
became a nexus of “alternative” therapies such as acupuncture, naturopathy, and
homeopathy or - as they are known to actual scientists - “kinda bullshit”,
“bullshit” and “supreme bullshit”. A bit of acupuncture may relax you,
relieve some pain, and improve your mood, but flesh-eating bacteria don’t
really give a damn what kind of a mood you’re in, and no amount of good cheer
is going to simulate the effects of a powerful antibiotic. And no amount
of crackpot theories dissolved a thousand times in water will stop the
onslaught of AIDS without the help of a cocktail of anti-retrovirals.
People buy in to
the Gesundheit Institute’s nonsense because they saw Patch Adams and decided
that medicine was a bunch of serious old men who had no idea what they were
doing since Patch cured those kids with laughter. These credulous but
otherwise innocent people then die after taking vitamins for thyroid
cancer.
Made for TV Movies
Who it Killed: Hedviga Golik
One day Ms. Golik
sat down in front of her TV and set a world record in laziness when she stayed
there dead for more than 42 years. This poor, poor tortured soul could
have theoretically sat through more than two hundred thousand showings of
Christmas Cottage. Though theologians will probably debate for centuries
whether this would be a worse punishment than the one meted out to Academy
Award winner Peter O’Toole, who was forced to play a supporting role in this
movie.
Natural Born
Killers
Who it Killed:
Where to start?
Stone was sued
after two 18-year-olds watched the movie then carried out a robbery that
resulted in murder. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold supposedly used the
movie’s initials, “NBK”, as code for their planned rampage. A seventeen
year old shaved his head to look like Woody Harrelson (a sure sign of trouble
regardless of what movie we’re talking about), wore the same circular glasses
as the character, and then shot his step-mother and half-sister while they
slept. The list goes on and on. Forget brief nipple shots; it’s
movies like this that prove that violence needs an equal weight in
ratings. Clearly this movie inspired troubled yet otherwise harmless
crazies to kill. After all, this would never happen with a more
wholesome, Christian movie… excepting Passion of the Christ. What about
something as harmless and classic as The Ten Commandments? Surely no one
has ever…
The Ten
Commandments
Who it Killed:
About a dozen women
Having apparently
traveled to the future, Heinrich Pommerencke was determined to beat out all the
pussy psychos on this list in the most brutal fashions imaginable. Pommerencke
didn’t just want to murder someone in a fit of passion, or because they
insulted his favorite movie. He went on a raping, murdering,
tossing-women-off-trains-then-raping-them-some-more spree. Known as the
“Beast of the Black Forest”, Pommerencke raped and murdered between 1959 and
1960 before being finally being captured and brought to justice.
Under intense
interrogation, Pommerencke admitted that he was absolutely obsessed with the
idea of sex, and that he had been inspired by the licentious dancing in The Ten
Commandments. While Pommerencke deserves credit for remaining awake more
than 15 minutes in to The Ten Commandments, this whole situation really begs a
few questions. If it is impossible to make what is possibly the most wholesome,
moral movie in history this side of Veggie Tales so sparkling clean that
someone can’t be inspired to murder, are we all willing to finally grow up and
agree that serial killers will be serial killers, whether they watch violent
movies or not?
Source : http://www.popcrunch.com
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