Jason Voorhees, the hockey mask clad killer of camp counselors and many others in the Friday the 13th (1980) franchise, may have been the inspiration for a real serial killer in Wales. The original 1980 slasher film is about grief-stricken Pamela Voorhees who terrorizes and murders a handful of teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake to avenge her son's drowning. Subsequent films reveal Jason is alive and a homicidal maniac who continues his mother's killing spree. The films span over three decades, making it one of the most enduring and highest-grossing horror franchises worldwide. The movies have spawned a TV series, novels, video games, and comics.
Victor Miller, who created the horror film icon, combined the first names of his two sons, Ian and Josh, and a girl he knew in school whose last name was Van Voorhees. Although Jason is supposed to be a fictitious character, there are striking similarities in the film to a series of grisly murders in Finland in the summer of 1960. Three teens were stabbed to death while camping at Lake Bodom. The sole survivor, who escaped with a broken jaw and a concussion, was arrested and later acquitted.
Friday the 13th may have inspired a cinema owner in North Wales, Peter Moore, to stab and mutilate four male victims over the course of three months in 1995. The Man in Black Peter Moore: Wales' Worst Serial Killer, written by Moore's former attorney Dylan Rhys Jones, outlines details of the case. Initially, Moore confessed to the crimes, but later pled not guilty, blaming the murders on a fictitious lover and restaurant worker named Jason, who Jones and the prosecution believed to be based on Jason Voorhees. According to a MailOnline article, Jones said, "Moore certainly knew a lot about the cinema and would have known about the Friday the 13th franchise, and one of the films had come out shortly before the murders started. It may well have been an inspiration for Moore - certainly, we all thought of it as that."
Lord Carlile of Berreview (the former Lib-Dem MP for Montgomeryshire), the lead prosecutor on the case, said, " ... we started looking at some films, and there was a film series which Moore would have seen or shown, an episodic film showing someone who killed people. Each film had six episodes in circumstances which were strikingly like the ways in which Peter Moore carried out these murders." Moore was found guilty and is serving a life sentence.
Moore isn't the only killer who was influenced by horror movies when committing his crimes. In 2001, a Belgium truck driver Thierry Jaradin donned a Ghostface costume -- the Scream killer -- before stabbing a young woman 30 times who spurned his romantic advances. In 2012, Texas teenager Jake Evans shot his mother and sister after watching Rob Zombie's Halloween (the only franchise to surpass Friday the 13th at the box office thanks to Michael Myers' constant resurrections) three times the same week. The Purge, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw IV, and American Psycho have inspired other heinous killings.
A 2017 article in The Washington Post addressed the debate over whether horror films incite violence offscreen. The piece cites a study that acknowledges copycat violence is possible. However, economists Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna conducted an analysis that indicates these types of movies tip the crime rate in the other direction. Dahl and DellaVigna hypothesized that people capable of committing criminal acts are drawn to the theater when a violent film is released, which deters them from committing assaults. During a panel at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, director John Carpenter stated, "Real life causes this, fake life does not cause it. The reason for a lot of these movies is the culture that we live in, the events that have gone on in our world," according to THR. Moore admitted to other violent acts spanning a 20 year period, which can't be blamed on Friday the 13th.