Friday, June 6, 2008

6 Flicks That Drove Crazies to Kill

by Ransom Riggs

Ransom RiggsJust as the literature-inspired shooters of the 70s and 80s were probably crazy long before they picked up a copy of Catcher on the Rye, the psychos who claim a movie drove them to kill were probably psycho long before screening Psycho. (But hey, you never know.) These are six films that supposedly pushed people over the edge.

bug_ver3.jpg1. William Friedkin's BUG

This creepy but not entirely successful 2006 psycho-thriller about paranoia and insect infestations was directed by William Friedkin, most famous for The Exorcist.

Despite dealing with a few murders and plenty of craziness in its own plot, the crime it inspired was considerably more horrific and strange. In January, blaring headlines like "Millionaire executive unhinged by horror film killed daughter" announced the tragedy, apparently trigged as stressed-out insurance executive Alberto Izaga watched Bug in a theater with his wife. (It was the only movie playing that had available seats; perhaps this tragedy could've been avoided, ironically, if the film were more popular?) Soon after, his wife would find him babbling incoherently in the middle of the night, shouting about the film, the Devil and death. Experiencing what his wife would call an "extreme and sudden" breakdown, he bludgeoned his two-year-old daughter to death while yelling "God doesn't exist! The universe doesn't exist! Humanity doesn't exist!" Judged not guilty by reason of insanity, the judge passed sentence thusly: "This is a truly agonizing case. No sentence I pass can ever match the sentence you will pass on yourself."

2. The Matrix and the Landlady Effect

The Matrix and its many sequels are deadly films. Deadly not only in terms of pacing, plot development and believability (the sequels especially), but also, strangely, to landladies. Claiming they had been "sucked into the Matrix," a Swedish exchange student, Vadim Mieseges, and an Ohio woman, Tonda Lynn Ansley, attacked their landladies in an attempt to free themselves from mind control. Both plead (and were granted) insanity, and thus liberated from the Matrix (and, one would assume, their leases), they're "free" to spend the rest of their lives in mental hospitals.

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