Calgary-shot series unveils Shocking Truth
Alberta-shot true crime series Shocking Truth recreates gruesome events that inspired movies
They are not the Alberta spots usually associated with abject horror.
In fact, most seem rather tranquil.
Fish Creek Provincial Park. Ghost Lake. The Riverbend Campground near Okotoks. Kinbrook Island on Lake Newell near Brooks.
But for six weeks last year, these were the locations cannily used by the Calgary cast and crew of the true crime series The Shocking Truth to recreate some of history’s most horrifying incidents, which in turn inspired some of Hollywood’s most horrifying movies.
In early September, for instance, the crew entered the frigid waters of Lake Newell to recreate the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks that inspired Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. An actor playing serial killer Ted Bundy, reportedly a loose inspiration for Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, terrorized his prey in Fish Creek Park, which was subbing in for the Pacific Northwest. To play Lake Berryessa, the California spot where the Zodiac killer claimed two victims in 1969, the crew went to Ghost Lake near Cochrane. The Riverbend Campground was used for a scene involving bloody body parts being fed into a wood chipper, a crime that was reportedly an early inspiration for the Coen brothers’ 1996 darkly comic classic, Fargo.
That 1986 murder, which involved airline pilot Richard Crafts butchering his stewardess wife, became a sensation in Connecticut, but the fact that it was at least partly the launching point for Joel and Ethan Coens’ Oscar-winning tale about murder and mayhem in the frozen Midwest is hardly common knowledge.
“The reason he got caught was he was on the banks of a river and putting her body parts through a wood chipper,” says Sheila Rae, the Calgary-based showrunner of The Shocking Truth. “It was four in the morning in this massive storm and this fella came along, a snowplow operator, and it was very odd. Why would someone be out in a storm with a woodchipper on the side of the road? He stopped to ask if he needed any help and the guy just raised him off. But this became very critical evidence after the fact. So we filmed that scene and needed there to be snow on the ground.”
Fans of Fargo know that there was a trademark “true story” text that opens the film. But it was widely believed this was just a sly wink by the Coens to ape the true-crime genre. Turns out, there were real events behind the story, even if they were very loosely applied to the filmmakers’ onscreen story.
“In the Fargo episode, we have the Coen brothers talking about how they saw a headline about a wood-chipper murder, because it was a big case in the 1980s, and that provided inspiration for them for the film,” Rae says.
Fargo is just one of 12 films that get the Shocking Truth treatment. The series returns to E! Canada on Monday with the true story behind David Fincher’s 2007 thriller Zodiac, a fact-based look at the unsolved serial killings in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1960s. Audiences have already seen the real-life inspirations behind the Silence of the Lambs, The Amityville Horror, The Exorcist and Goodfellas.
Still to come are episodes dedicated to The Conjuring, Psycho, Foxcatcher, Natural Born Killers, Fargo, Monster and Jaws.
Produced by Pyramid Productions — whose Calgary studios were also used to play interrogation rooms for the Silence of the Lambs, Goodfellas, Fargo and Psycho episodes -- the series mixes dramatizations, interviews with people involved in the real cases behind the films and archival interviews with actors and filmmakers. So we get insights from Anthony Hopkins about Silence of the Lambs, or Steve Carell about playing multimillionaire killer John Eleuthere du Pont in the 2014 docudrama Foxcatcher.
But also key to the series was finding people to talk about the real events.
“We looked at the actual stories and how interesting are those stories and can we find people to talk to us about it,” says Rae. “It was very important to use that for every episode we find people who actually lived and breathed those episodes.”
So while the dramatizations were all filmed in and around Calgary, the series required the crew to travel throughout North America to track down lawyers, police officers, witnesses and others who could offer first-hand accounts of the crimes or alleged paranormal activities that inspired the films.
That included interviewing Daniel Lutz, who lived through the terrors that inspired the classic ghost film, Amityville Horror. Also interviewed was Andrea Perron, one of five girls who lives in the supposedly haunted Rhode Island farmhouse that inspired the 2013 horror hit The Conjuring. Fred Reid was the neighbour of body-snatching Wisconsin killer and Ed Gein back in the '50s, so got a close look at the infamous crimes that loosely inspired the 1960 classic, Psycho. Retired police officer Pierre Bidou was first on the scene for one of the Zodiac Killer’s murders.
“It’s a lot of research and a lot of what we call 'chase,' which I think is one of the most fun parts of doing a series like this,” says Rae. “You use every tool you’ve got. The Internet is an amazing tool. You use Facebook, you find articles, you find out where they are living and you look into phone records.”
For some of the episodes, the real-life inspiration is fairly direct, such as the 2003 docudrama Monster about serial killer Aileen Wuornos, or Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic Goodfellas. Others, such as Fargo, Natural Born Killers and the Exorcist used their real-life inspirations in less obvious ways.
“They are all well-known films, people will recognize the titles,” Rae says. “But a lot of times they don’t realize it was based on a true story and there are always facts and details from the true story that they don’t really know. That’s where the title came from: Here’s the shocking truth behind the story.”
it was very odd. Why would someone be out in a storm with a wood-chipper on the side of the road?