Natural Born Killers is still looked at as one of Oliver Stone’s most controversial movies, but the fact that the film is loosely based on real people makes it even more unnerving.
Oliver Stone is a prolific filmmaker who has made many important contributions to cinema. He’s both a writer and director who loves to court controversy; his affection towards conspiracy and the media’s role in society has become an interesting lens for Stone. Natural Born Killers is an exciting movie because it features Stone bringing to life an early script from Quentin Tarantino, although it was heavily re-written by Stone. It’s a movie that has many moments where the serious director is at his most playful, and remains one of the more visually distinct films from Stone’s career.
Stone’s revisions to Natural Born Killers were to make it more of a story about media’s celebration and desensitizing of violence to mass audiences. It’s an idea that’s still relevant now, but was a growing curiosity and problem in the 1990s. Stone’s movie taps into the anxiety of that decade and slightly pulls from real events to help create the film’s murderous young lovers, Mickey and Mallory.
Natural Born Killers: The True Story & Crime Spree Explained
Natural Born Killers' script isn't explicitly based on any people, but between Quentin Tarantino's original scripts and the edits that were done along the way, there's some incorporation of the real-life tragedies caused by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, two teenagers from Lincoln, Nebraska. Starkweather and Fugate's trajectory follows the same broader points of Mickey and Mallory. In 1958, over the course of ten days, the pair took nine lives during their destructive road trip through the country.
Much like with Woody Harrelson's Mickey, Starkweather appeared to the ringleader, and Fugate's own family was even taken out and paid the price. The two were eventually apprehended and arrested, but their story was notable, especially in the 1950s, before violent crime was as commonplace as it has become in modern times. Their crimes have inspired several movies besides Natural Born Killers, which stuck closer to Starkweather and Fugate’s painful narrative.
Starkweather and Fugate may be the backbone for the Mickey and Mallory characters, but Stone also pulled from other real crimes that were sensationalized on television in order to channel that same manipulative atmosphere. The very public matters of the Menendez brothers, O.J. Simpson, Rodney King, Tonya Harding, and how the media handled them also played a major influence on Stone's Natural Born Killers.