The True Story free essay sample

A Nightmare On Elm Street and The Mothman In the early part of 1980, American newspapers ran a series of short stories  chronicling a serious epidemic in Southeast Asia which claimed the lives of a number of young adults. According to doctors, these relatively healthy men, all without a history of mental disorders, began reporting strange nightmares which kept them from sleep in order to avoid these terrors in their dreams. The consumption of coffee and other drugs helped the men remain awake, at first, but eventually each man went to sleep. Hours later, the men would be found screaming and violently thrashing in their beds before dying from unknown causes. â€Å"In the Philippines, it’s called bangungot, in Japan pokkuri, in Thailand, something else. † says Dr. Robert Kirschner, a physician familiar with this strange phenomenon. â€Å"But it all roughly translates as the same thing: nightmare death. † While Freddy Krueger was not the reported figure, Southeast Asians believed demons had invaded the dream realm of these men, eventually claiming them in their nightmares. We will write a custom essay sample on The True Story or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page These stories eventually came to provide the basis for Wes Craven would build his critical success as a horror director and producer. These events would spawn nine movies in a series and eventually a remake that would still keep this generation’s children up at night. It began in mid-November 1966, when two couples, parked at an old World War II dump site that the locals called TNT, say they were chased by a large creature. They reported the incident to the police, and the sightings continued from there. Some said the creature chased them to the ground. Others suffered from bleeding eyes after reportedly seeing it. Many never slept well again. It did not help to calm fears when the towns investigative reporter Mary Hyre, who had devoted much press coverage to the Mothman, died suddenly. One theory is that people saw a huge sandhill crane that veered off course. Another is that it was a giant, mutated owl. And others say the people in Point Pleasant succumbed to mass hysteria. I believe that some people saw something. It was probably a bird, said Hilda Austin, 58, who lived through the Mothman sightings and is currently the head of the Point Pleasant Chamber of Commerce. Some of it was just hoax. It could have been something spawned by the toxic ground from the TNT area. Some of the eyewitnesses were on drugs. I thought it was a hoot, everyone just sort of laughed at this. They just thought it was preposterous. But others, like author Loren Coleman, said there is a history of this kind of lore in the Ohio River Valley. The Native American tribes of the area had a long history of passing stories about Thunderbirds, large bird-man figures that were always harbingers of woe. Much like A Nightmare on Elm Street the Mothman has also spawned a filmed, aptly titled The Mothman Prophecies. Which sensationalizes on the stories and warps the Mothman into some seer of disaster. Both of these stories and their movie counterparts have been scaring children and adults alike for decades not just because it was so stylishly executed on film, but because humans are more afraid of the plausible. It does not matter if it happened a 1,000 miles away in the same country or some unknown place in Asia, if the possibility is there it makes the story or film that much more scary and exciting and that is why these movies and stories have survived as long as they have.