True Stories: Family Members Gone Mad

With that Christian Longo guy killing and dumping his wife and kids in the ocean, I’ve been wondering: Is there any advanced indication that your loved one is capable of murder? Do you find your hubby standing over you in the middle of the night with a pick ax? Does your son nail plywood over his bedroom door? Or, scariest of all, do they just act completely normal? Well, we’ll never know–because the victims are dead–but perhaps these based-on-true stories of family members gone mad will provide some insight.

• Heavenly Creatures (1994)–Young New Zealand girls Pauline and Juliet
are just good friends who are obsessively infatuated with each other, eventually
morphing into one personality. They spend more and more time retreating into
their techno-color dream kingdom, until they completely lose grip of reality.
When Pauline’s mom gets wise to the compulsive nature of the relationship, the
girls club her to death with a rock. Stars Kate Winslet as Juliet, who is based
on real life mystery writer, Anne Perry.

• The Young Poisoner’s Handbook (1995)–A teenage boy, Graham,
loves chemistry and hates his stepmom, so he kills her by tainting her chocolates
with poison. He’s then shipped off to an insane asylum, where he is cared for
by Dr. Zeigler for eight long years. Once free, Graham makes deadly, hot-tea
cocktails for his coworkers at a photo lab, and is reinstitutionalized after
eight people die. The homicidal chemist then spends his time in lock up, writing
a poisoner’s handbook for the doctor. Dark and funny, with nasty-ass death scenes.

• The Amityville Horror (1979)–Whether this story is true or
not is still debatable, but it’s scary regardless. A newly married couple moves
into a giant house with a reduced price… merely because the previous family
was brutally murdered on the premises by their son. The husband, a young James
Brolin, slowly transforms, physically and mentally, into a replica of the murdering
son, while the evil spirit gets out its aggressions by locking babysitters in
closets, smashing hands in windows, filling rooms with flies, blinding priests,
making nuns vomit, stealing money, and flooding the basement with blood. Fun!