

The murder they then committed has come to be known as one of the most notorious crimes in history. For just the brief moment that the mother looked away, the two boys took him by the hand and walked him outside the mall. Two ten-year-old boys named Robert Thompson and Jon Venables kidnapped a toddler from a mall in Kirkby, Merseyside, England.

The heinous murder of two-year-old James Bulger in 1993 caused an outcry and a resurgence of the everlasting media violence debate.

RELATED: 10 Best Amityville Horror Movies With all this being said, how could Child’s Play, a silly and fun horror franchise about a pint-sized killer doll, be a reason for real-life murders? Child’s Play 3 (1991), although notoriously known for being the poorest film in the franchise for multiple reasons, was also in a lot of heat for apparently being one of the inspirations for the murder of two-year-old James Bulger. After the horrific Columbine High School massacre in 1999, the United States Senate Commerce Committee used the opening scene of Scream to highlight the influence cinematic violence has on society. On Halloween 1988, an 18-year-old girl named Sharon Gregory was murdered by a Jason Voorhees impersonator. It has been long debated: Why do people enjoy horror films? Does reel violence cause actual violence? Numerous movies have been accused of real-life murders: In 1998, two teenage boys stabbed their mother 45 times, and the boys claimed that the murders were inspired by Scream, even committing the act while wearing the Ghostface mask.
