The Exorcist By Willian Peter Blatty
Published in 1971, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is based on the story of Roland Doe (a pseudonym given by the Catholic Church) who was allegedly possessed by the devil. Born around 1936 to a German Lutheran family, Doe grew up in Cottage City, Maryland. An only child, he grew close to his Aunt Harriet. A spiritualist, Harriet introduced Doe to the Ouija board as a way to communicate with the dead. After Harriet passed away in 1949, it’s presumed that Doe used the Ouija board to contact his beloved aunt, which is when many believe Doe became possessed.

Dracula By Bram Stoker
It is based on a true story by the author. Not only stoker but many of them have penned down the same story differently.
Most of us are familiar with the antecedents of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the fifteenth-century Hungarian prince Vlad III. He was called Dracula because he was the son of Vlad II Dracul. But after Vlad’s death, he acquired a much more grisly nickname: Vlad the Impaler. Born in the winter of 1431, Vlad was the son of the Wallachia governor and (probably) one of his mistresses. His father assumed the throne of Wallachia five years later. Vlad received an excellent education designed to prepare him for the throne.

Jaws By Peter Benchley
On July 1, 1916, 25-year-old Charles Vansant was attacked by a shark off the coast of Beach Haven, New Jersey. Though lifeguards managed to pull him out of the water, Vansant died of blood loss on the beach. Then on July 6 in Spring Lake, about 45 miles north of Beach Haven, Charles Bruder was fatally attacked by a shark. Shark attacks were almost completely unheard of at the time, and the public was sent into a frenzy. A few days later, Captain Thomas Cottrell reported that he’d seen a ten-foot shark heading north toward Matawan Creek, an estuary that connects to Raritan Bay. People assumed that he was exaggerating about the shark’s size because of the recent attacks.

Frankenstein By Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley conceived of Frankenstein during a “scary story” contest at the villa of legendary author Lord Byron. The nineteen-year-old had plenty of real-life inspiration; four different scientists of the era all contributed to the character of Shelley’s own mad scientist, Dr. Victor Frankenstein. On Shelley’s summer reading list that summer was the work of Italian physicist Luigi Galvini. Fascinated by the prospects of bioelectricity, Galvini conducted experiments where he sent electrical currents through the bodies of dead frogs and noted that it caused the frogs’ muscles to twitch post-mortem.