“Based Upon A True Story”: Leopold & Loeb & Hitchcock’s ROPE (‘48)

“Based upon a true story”, “inspired by actual events”, those phrases are often used in Hollywood films that only bear a basic, crude resemblance to the real stories they are based upon. This phenomenon has really ramped up in recent years with “found footage” films like The Blair Witch Project (’99) and Paranormal Activity (’07).

The horror and thriller genres tend to capitalize on this “based upon a true story” idea more than others, but often change crucial details: The Exorcist (’73) was based upon the actual exorcism of a boy in St. Louis, Missouri (not a girl in Maryland as in the film); there is no real cannibal family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (’74), this film, like Hitchcock’s Psycho (’60), is based upon the life of paranoid schizophrenic Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein (we will be examining Psycho in two weeks for TCM’s #Hitchcock50 event); even A Nightmare on Elm Street (’84) was based on the true story of Laotian refugees who died in the midst of nightmares, and Child’s Play (’88) was based on the true story of the script author Robert Eugene Otto, interacting with a nurse who allegedly put a voodoo curse on his childhood doll that made it a nighttime terror.