Since then, over the last couple of weeks I have had at least a dozen applications for teaching the history behind the film, the "real story." The films are highly fictional, I note. Maybe I should plan a day to discuss real murders in Texas and only what is fiction, especially in Hollywood.
According to Snopes.com, one of my favorite places to discredit, there never was a massacre in Texas. There was a Wisconsin farmer who stole corpses from the local cemetery, and which was based on the previous film, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho. It was the display of Montgomery Ward chainsaw seen by the writer and director Toby Hooper, when the inspiration he needed to complete a screen treatment. That's it.
But it is almost Halloween, and the Hollywood studios hope to make money.
There are real crimes of Texas, it would be good fodder for films, in the hands of intelligent and creative people. One wonders why more movies are not made on the real stories.
Historian Kent Biffle is a weekly column on matters of Texas history in the Dallas Morning News, for example - and last week filed a murder mystery of 1847 in which guests at a wedding cake is served mixed with arsenic:
No matter how you sliced luxury dessert serves 60 residents of East Texas in May 1847 was the wedding cake from hell. A few toxic bites sent guests into convulsions. At least 10 died.
A lack of evidence of the autopsy, people blamed Backwoods arsenic poisoning.
The marriage united a young couple on a farm in Shelby County near the Sabine River settlement east of Hamilton, which today is little more than a cemetery where several suspects historian Bill O'Neal cake eaters lie.
Author O'Neal joins the massive poisoning which concludes was "mortal enmity of Texas" in his new book, The War in East Texas: Regulators vs. Moderators. Vigilantes organized as "regulators" to punish suspected criminals, usually by flogging. He soon traded in their whips and canes of a lynch mob ropes and guns. Moderators said that emerged to regulate the regulators. As usual, the implementation of mob justice, vigilante leaders tended to focus on his personal enemies, along with real criminals.
"Four years or so Regulator-Moderator War, along with a deadly aftermath, produced more than 30 deaths - more than 40 if the poisoned victims of the wedding party added," said the professor of the University Panola O ' Neal. It was in Nacogdoches last weekend to describe the Regulator-Moderator insurrection of the members of East Texas Historical Association.
Was a range war. A leader of one faction was so good to kill, he thought to raise an army and take over Texas. Sam Houston of Texas president personally intervened and brought the warring parties to the peace table (shades of the Camp David Accord). Then one was killed in a duel that is when her lover exchanged insults with the wife of a doctor.
Texas history is often the material of the films. Real things would be better movies that much of what was done in the movies nowadays. And for many, the stories are public domain. Few writers of payment.
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