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Victor Salva, director of the Jeepers Creepers trilogy, is a CONVICTED child molester.
Guest writer Joe Toft delves into five of the most shocking, controversial horror movies of all-time!
Horror has given us some of the most unforgettable moments in cinema. “It’s alive!” howled from Boris Karloff’s throat. “I want to play a game” whispered through a rotting tape recorder. These are the lines that live in our bones. But I’ve been an avid nerd of horror since I was a kid staring at VHS covers I was too young to rent, and somewhere along the way I started collecting a different kind of horror story: the controversial ones that happened off screen. The lawsuits. The trials. The secrets that outlived the films themselves.
Horror hides things. Sometimes behind latex and prosthetics, sometimes behind a courtroom strategy, sometimes behind a public persona built over something rotten underneath. From a legendary copyright war over Nosferatu to the gut-wrenching truth behind Jeepers Creepers, here are five stories about what happens when the mask comes off and the controversies emerge …
Controversial Movie Number 1:
Nosferatu (1922) — A Film Legally Sentenced to Death!
Before Robert Eggers ever laid a hand on Count Orlok, F.W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu was already fighting for its life in a German courtroom. Prana Film never bothered securing the rights to Dracula. They just swapped the names, filed the serial numbers off the plot, and hoped Bram Stoker’s widow wouldn’t notice.
She noticed.
Florence Stoker dragged Prana Film through years of litigation and won. A German court ordered every print and negative burned. Prana went bankrupt before it could pay her a cent, so the destruction of the film became the only justice left to collect. Here’s the delicious irony: it didn’t fully die. Copies had already slipped overseas, into a country where Dracula was public domain, and one surviving print became the seed of every Nosferatu that exists today. A movie legally erased from the earth became one of the most influential horror films ever made. Even the changes Murnau made to dodge the lawsuit, sunlight killing vampires, no Van Helsing in sight, rewrote vampire lore forever. Orlok wore Dracula’s name just long enough to get caught, then clawed his way out of his own grave twice.
Controversial Movie Number 2:
Cannibal Holocaust (1980) — A Director Put on Trial for Murder!
Ruggero Deodato’s found-footage nightmare was so convincing it fooled the actual Italian legal system. Ten days after it premiered in Milan, the film was seized and Deodato was hit with obscenity charges. Then it got worse. The cast had signed contracts agreeing to disappear from public life for a year, a marketing gimmick meant to sell the illusion that the footage was real. Prosecutors didn’t see a gimmick. They saw a body count.
Deodato was put on trial for murder. Actual murder. To save himself, he had to hunt down his own actors and parade them into an Italian courtroom, alive and breathing, then explain on the record exactly how each kill was faked, right down to the infamous impalement rig built from a bicycle seat and a hidden sliver of wood. The murder charges evaporated. The obscenity conviction didn’t, and the film was banned across multiple countries for years. Deodato spent three more years in court just to get his own movie legalized again in Italy. The marketing was the disguise, so real it nearly cost him his freedom.
Controversial Movie Number 3:
The Exorcist (1973) — The Movie That Made America Sick!
William Friedkin’s possession classic didn’t just terrify audiences. It hospitalized some of them. Fainting, vomiting, reported heart attacks, right there in the seats. Warner Bros. didn’t hide from it, they fed it. The original trailer, a minute of strobing, dissolving flashes of a possessed Regan, made test audiences physically ill, and the studio yanked it from theaters entirely, which only made people more desperate to see the movie it came from.
The Catholic Church wasn’t laughing. Church leaders publicly distanced themselves from the film’s portrayal of possession and exorcism, and entire cities and countries moved to ban or restrict it. Parts of the UK kept home releases illegal for years. Friedkin, meanwhile, seemed to feed off the outrage, saying the best publicity he could dream of was a denouncement straight from the Pope. The backlash didn’t kill the film. It built its legend, and helped crown it the highest-grossing horror movie ever made.
Controversial Movie Number 4:
Victor Salva and Jeepers Creepers — A Franchise Built Over a Buried Crime!
This controversy isn’t a marketing stunt or a courtroom technicality. This is a real crime the industry chose to look past. In 1988, director Victor Salva was convicted of sexually abusing Nathan Forrest Winters, the 12-year-old star of Salva’s own directorial debut, Clownhouse, and of filming the abuse. He served fifteen months of a three-year sentence. Here’s the part that still crawls under my skin. Francis Ford Coppola, who had produced Clownhouse, kept backing Salva after his release, funding his next film and later executive producing Jeepers Creepers. Winters spent years organizing protests against Salva’s work, including a boycott of Disney’s Powder, but the career kept moving forward anyway. The wound reopened in 2017 when Jeepers Creepers 3 included a scene that seemed to joke about a stepfather’s inappropriate interest in a teenage character, a decision that triggered immediate backlash and was partially cut before the theatrical release. This is the one story on this list where nothing was latex. The disguise was a career, worn in public for decades over something the industry knew and funded anyway.
Controversial Movie Number 5:
Terrifier 2 (2022) — The Slasher That Sent People to the ER!
Damien Leone proved practical gore still has teeth. Reports out of opening weekend described moviegoers fainting, vomiting, getting wheeled out by paramedics mid-screening. One attendee posted about a friend who dropped cold in his seat while an ambulance was called to the theater. Some screenings handed out barf bags in advance, with a warning slapped on that the film was “guaranteed to cause gastrointestinal upset.”
Leone didn’t flinch from any of it. He called the reaction surreal, joked that walkouts were basically a badge of honor. Made on a budget of roughly $250,000, the film went on to gross well past it in limited release. In an age where marketing algorithms try to engineer virality out of thin air, Terrifier 2 proved the oldest pitch in horror still works best: this movie will make you sick, and you’ll buy a ticket anyway.
Every story on this list wore something different. A copyright, a marketing lie, a possessed girl who made a nation flinch, a crime that never should have been forgiven, a clown that didn’t need a gimmick to make people sick. Pull back any of it, and the same thing is always underneath: something real, staring back.
Stay Strange.
