who is your favorite monster of all time, some people may enjoy the imaginary ones such as Jason or Michele Myers, but some prefer the more realistic ones that have inspired Hollywood. After a horror movie, we can all take comfort in telling ourselves that “its just a movie” but sadly that cannot be said about all of these works of art. These films both terrify and intrigue us, and who doesn’t enjoy a little self inflicted fear from time to time?

Robert The Doll – Child’s Play

In 1903 a boy received a doll dressed in a sailor costume from a servant that tended to the boy’s parents, the servant was supposedly proficient in voodoo. The boy, (Eugene) as he is often called, developed an unhealthy attachment to the doll. The doll’s name that the boy chose for him was Robert. The boy took the doll everywhere he went even through adulthood. He has been reported being heard in his room having a conversation with the doll, then hearing a strange completely different voice response. Robert is reportedly responsible for multiple car wrecks, broken bones, failed relationships, and job loses. The doll currently sits in the Key West Martello museum.
The 1988 film “Child’s Play” is based upon this doll. In the film, a murderer is chased by police into a toy factory and is fatally shot by police, before dying the man uses a voodoo curse to transfer his soul into a children’s “Good Guys” doll and is trapped there for all eternity until he can find a purely innocent human host to perform the voodoo curse again. He chooses a young boy and pretends to be the boy’s friend until he kidnaps the child and is shot through the heart which is the only way to kill the possessed toy.

Charles Manson – The Strangers

In the 1960’s commune leader Charles Manson persuaded a small group of youth to conduct one of the most frightening mass murders of its time which inspired the famous book “Helter Skelter”. The Manson Family thought a line of a popular beetles song was warning the group of young people of a upcoming race war between blacks and whites and that the gruesome murders would help to ignite the violence between the two. By murdering a total of seven people including famous actor Sharon Marie Tate. After killing these people, the group destroyed the house and wrote the Beatles lyric “Helter Skelter” in the victim’s blood.

In the 2008 film “The Strangers”, a young couple who are staying in a isolated cabin in the woods when they are visited by a strange female who asks for a person who is not there and then walks away. Throughout the movie the young couple are stalked as they slowly wait for the masked strangers to attack. The three strangers slowly stalk and make their way into the house before tying up the couple and slowly stabbing them to death with a butcher’s knife.

Gertrude Baniszewski – The Girl Next Door

The acts of Gertrude Baniszewski can only be described as many believe to be true evil in its purest form. Gertrude was the nanny of Sylvia Likens and her sister Jenny. What Gertrude did to the girls would go on to be described as “the single worst act perpetrated against a single individual in Indiana”. The two girls stayed with Gertrude while her their mother was in jail, Gertrude had two teenage girls of her own who took part in the torture. Gertrude began to mainly focus on Sylvia, mentally and physically abusing her, calling her a prostitute and beating her with paddles, pushing her down stairs, rubbing salt in her open wounds, depriving her from food in water for days, burning her with boiling water, and even having her boyfriend sexually abuse her. Gertrude told her children to fake a runaway letter stating that she was running away with a group of boys as their prostitute.the children would then throw her withered body in the woods to die. But before this happened she managed to get free, only to be captured again and thrown in the basement again. She died from her wounds, malnutrition, and a brain hemorrhage soon after at the age of 16. The 2007 film “The Girl Next Door” follows this plot and exposes these terrifying deeds to the world.

Ed Gein – Texas Chainsaw Massacre

    Ed Gein was born in 1906 under a roof controlled by a extremely controlling mother and his two brothers. Ed had developed an unhealthy and many believe rather odd relationship with his mother and after her death in 1945, ed’s mental state declined rapidly. His brothers death soon followed, ed was suspected to have murdered his brother Henry when his body was found in a burning brush pile. In 1967 Ed Gein was

 arrested for the murder of a local woman of Wisconsin who went by the name of Bernice Worden when police found her headless, gutted body hanging upside down in his shed, along with several other body parts that were used for things like soup bowls, spoons, masks, and even a armchair, all made from his victims corpses. He was arrested when the court decided that he was mentally “fit” to stand trial. He was declared insane and was sent to a mental asylum where he died of cancer in July 26, 1984.

Ed Gein inspired the 1974 film “The texas Chainsaw Massacre”. In this film, a young woman hears that her grandfather’s grave may have been robbed. So Sally and her friends set out to find the source of this news but not before visiting the families old abandoned farm. She then discovers that a family of terrifying cannibals have moved in next door. The teens are then picked off one by one by a chainsaw wielding psychopath who wears a mask made out of the faces of past victims so he may feed his family their flesh.

Jeffrey Dahmer – My Friend Dahmer

Between the years 1971 and 1991 local recluse Jeffrey Dahmer took the lives of 17 known men, performing necrophilia, dismemberment, and even the cannibalization of his victims, giving him the title of “The Milwaukee Cannibal”. Jeffery was not always known as the famous psychopath that we know today. Jeffrey grew up Milwaukee California with his two parents. Growing up in a extremely abusive household and with very limited social skills, he had very few friends. At the age of 16 his parents packed their bags and left Jeffery alone to fend for himself in a empty house. He was often bullied at school and was labeled as a freak for his fascination with animal and human anatomy. He would often take home road kill and skin and preserve the bones using skills that his father taught him. Lonely and depressed, he sought out companionship with a local jogger. He invited him over, drank with him, and when the man decided to leave Jeffery couldn’t stand the thought of being alone so he beat him to death with the lamp and buried his body in the back yard. Feeling the rush of excitement Dahmer would then go on to do this again, posing as a potential romantic partner, he would meet men, take them back to his place, drug them, and would either kill, rape, and eat them, or tie them up and try to live out a romantic fantasy before they tried to escape. Tracy Edwards, a young black man escaped from Dahmer’s apartment that he was staying as and ran down the street naked and handcuffed, Jeffery told police that they were lovers who had been fighting, the police escorted Tracy back to the apartment and when leaving Dahmer strangled the young man to death. Upon further investigation, the police searched the house and along with finding several skulls that were kept as trophies, the officers also discovered a deep freezer with severed limbs and body parts that Jeffery planned to eat. He was arrested in 1991 and on November 28 1994 he was beaten to death in prison with a broomstick by a fellow inmate.

The 2017 film “My Friend Dahmer” shows the beginning of the famous psychopaths life as a teenager suffering from abuse and mental disorder.