Few horror films are as iconic as Wes Craven 's 1996 slasher-flick Scream, which sees a duo of arranged college students prey on their peers - attacking them while disguised in a Halloween costume. The film starred Courtney Cox, Drew Barrymore, and Neve Campbell, and with the all-star cast you could be mistaken for thinking the movie was purely a work of fiction, but that's not quite the case.
Kevin Williamson wrote the original screenplay and he was inspired by a spate of killings in Florida by a man named Danny Rolling, who brutally murdered university students and anyone who got in his way. He would later become known as the Gainesville Ripper due to the severity of his crimes, and the drama that unfolded was later portrayed on screen.
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Danny Rolling murdered eight people and was only caught when he was arrested for a different crime and he confessed to the unsolved killings.
He first killed 24-year-old Julie Grissom, her father Tom Grissom, and her nephew Sean, eight, in May 1990 in Shreveport, Louisiana, before going on to shoot his own 58-year-old father, James Rolling, who survived but was badly injured.
Rolling then went on the run, changing his identity with documents he stole from a home. He fled to Florida where he started a new life as Michael Kennedy Jr.
He then went on to murder Tracy Inez Paules, Sonja Larson, Manuel Taboada, Christa Hoyt, and Christina Powell, all students of the University of Florida in Gainesville.
Rolling, who was 6'2 and had spent time in the military, followed his victims home before breaking in and overpowering them. He then covered his tracks using information he learned from his father who had been a policeman.
Local police were unable to find evidence and had no idea who was behind the crimes, even though he left behind multiple crime scenes with mutilated corpses.
News of the unsolved murders spread rapidly across the university campus and soon students began to panic, and before the crimes were solved some 700 pupils quit their studies out of fear for their lives.
Those who remained on campus would only leave the house in pairs, would triple lock doors, and people would sleep in shifts so someone was always on watch - just like in the film Scream.
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As students armed themselves with baseball bats, the university cancelled classes and the Gainesville Ripper continued to break into homes and steal from petrol stations.
Rolling was eventually caught on September 8 after a high-speed car chase, but he was only wanted for the robbery of a resident named Winn-Dixie.
Soon after, a police officer noticed similarities between the murders in Florida and the unsolved killings in Louisiana, so investigators sought DNA from offenders in the area - and Rolling's was a near enough match.
When presented with the evidence in January, some four months after the murders in Florida, Rolling confessed to being the Gainesville Ripper and he was sentenced to death in 1994, and he was executed in 2006.
Kevin Williamson, the author of the Scream screenplay, noticed the case of the Gainesville Ripper, and he focused on the hysteria among the students which featured in the hit film.
He said: "Back when I was researching Danny Rolling, I wanted to write about a serial killer on a college campus, and an FBI agent hunting down a college professor. But then I decided to do Scream."
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