A man haunted by the ghost of a boy he’s convinced is trying to kill him. A family buys a dream house only to find the home comes with a stalker. Dear David and The Watcher are two real-life horror stories coming soon to a screen near you. Let’s check them out.
Dear David
The Dear David saga originated on Twitter when then-Buzzfeed author and illustrator Adam Ellis captured the image of a ghost child in his New York City apartment.
“My apartment is currently being haunted by the ghost of a dead child and he’s trying to kill me.”
That Tweet sparked the first of Ellis’s many spine-tingling entries in the #DearDavid saga that both tantalized and terrorized readers on Twitter. Over 14 million people ended up following along as he documented all kinds of strange phenomena, which included everything from horribly vivid nightmares to sounds in the middle of the night that he recorded while he slept.
But it went beyond just that and eventually would lead Ellis to a strange abandoned warehouse, Japan, and finding weird items stashed in his crawlspace. As Fangoria put it, “and this is only a small fraction it.”
It was all so compelling it landed him a movie deal, which is appropriately titled Dear David. Ellis wrote it along with Evan Turner and Mike Van Waes. It stars Augustus Prew, Andrea Bang and Justin Long.
No word on a release date yet but it’s currently in post-production, so we know this real-life horror story adaptation is coming soon.
The Watcher
Another real-life horror story that captured the public’s attention was the story of the Westfield Watcher House. Soon after Derek and Maria Broaddus closed on the New Jersey Dutch colonial in 2014 they received a letter signed “The Watcher,” who partially introduced himself like this:
“My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time.”
The trouble is, The Watcher had never made his presence known before that. The previous owners had lived there since the 1960s and only received a letter the week before closing. But the Broaddus family continued to receive letters from the mysterious and alarming strasnger.
It’s as suspicious as it is creepy, which makes it perfect fodder for a movie. It was turned into a made-for-TV movie once, but Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy have adapted the case of the Westfield Watcher house into a Netflix series.
Other than 2022, an exact release date hasn’t been announced yet for it either.
Check-In
Are there are any other real-life horror stories you can think of that you’d like to see made into a movie or TV series?
Courtney Mroch is a globe-trotting restless spirit who’s both possessed by wanderlust and the spirit of adventure, and obsessed with true crime, horror, the paranormal, and weird days. Perhaps it has something to do with her genes? She is related to occult royalty, after all. Marie Laveau, the famous Voodoo practitioner of New Orleans, is one of her ancestors. (Yes, really! As explained here.) That could also explain her infatuation with skeletons.
Speaking of mystical, to learn how Courtney channeled her battle with cancer to conjure up this site, check out HJ’s Origin Story.
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Other real life horror stories made into movies? More Bigfoot encounter stories, please! That’d be hard to do, though, because the encounters are so rare and not well documented.
Ooo! But I like what you’re thinking! Hulu had that really good docuseries about a perhaps Bigfoot case. I can see that being turned into an equally compelling drama series.