Almost everyone knows that THE AMITYVILLE HORROR was based on events that purportedly took place in Amityville, New York, and many are aware that THE MOTHMAN PROPECIES relates to incidents that occurred in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. However, far fewer folks know that POLTERGEIST is loosely based on occurrences in the 1950s, or that the video game adaptation SILENT HILL was also inspired by the abandonment of Centralia, Pennsylvania in 1962. Chiller TV’s two-hour special REAL FEAR: THE TRUTH BEHIND THE MOVIES, which premiered last night and airs again this Wednesday, March 14 at 7 p.m. ET, examines all of these cases.

Executive-produced by Larry Landsman and director John D’Auria, REAL FEAR utilizes a team of four hosts, led by associate producer and PARANORMAL STATE veteran Katrina Weidman. She seems a good choice for the task of investigating possible paranormal activity, as she is candid about her belief in the supernatural. “The first house we lived in,” she says, “from the time I was born until I was about 6 years old, I have memories of waking up in the middle of the night being scared, and then running to my parents or my sister’s room. Maybe that’s normal for a little kid, but other people in my family have had experiences. There was one night where I was in the living room, and my [older] sister came downstairs and was surprised: ‘How did you get downstairs without me seeing you.’ She told me she saw a little girl sitting on my bed who looked like me, and we went upstairs and nobody was there.

“My sister also saw a man walk into the bathroom many, many nights,” Weidman continues. “She told my mom about it, and my mom said, ‘Oh, it’s probably your father,’ and my sister said, ‘No, this guy is skinny.’ My dad is a very big Italian man. And after we moved out, my aunt took over the house and had a lot of experiences with her baby’s toys going off by themselves, even toys that required batteries, even though there were no batteries in them. And then the family who moved in after that had more experiences and actually contacted us about it, because they thought they were losing their minds.”

Not that Weidman believes everyone’s claims of ghostly encounters. “When you’re talking to somebody, you have to remain objective. There are so many natural explanations, but a lot of people, when they’re scared, don’t look for those. It’s very easy to just say, ‘Oh my God, it’s got to be a ghost,’ instead of calling an electrician or somebody to check your gas lines, or checking around to see if the cat got loose. The other thing is, eyewitness accounts are not reliable all the time. The human eye can play tricks.”

However, Weidman puts credence in the interviews that made the final cut in REAL FEAR. “Everything is tied into the historical facts,” she says. “I don’t remember meeting anybody [during the course of the interviews where she felt], ‘You know what, they’re totally off their rocker, they’re lying.’ ”

Weidman actually has a family connection with SILENT HILL inspiration Centralia: Her great-grandmother was raised in the area, and a multitude of cousins and other relatives lived there until the underground coal fires began raging in 1962 and haven’t stopped since. Weidman says that the town wasn’t fully evacuated until an incident in the 1980s. “A young boy started to fall through a sinkhole in his grandmother’s backyard,” she explains, “and his brother saved him, and that’s what started the whole ‘We need to evacuate, this place is going to collapse on itself.’ There are still about four families living in the town, but when you go there—I became really emotional when I went, because I was there when I was 11 or 12, and it was still a town back then. When we came back for REAL FEAR, you would never guess there was a town there, and it’s very overwhelming. What I felt when I was there wasn’t so much fear, it was a kind of heartbreak, because an entire town was wiped out.”

Centralia doesn’t represent a conventional haunting, but a distinct phenomenon, Weidman believes. “There are different kinds of hauntings. One is commonly referred to as a residual haunting, when something is so traumatic or very happy—something with a lot of energy, or even something that was so repetitively done, like maybe Grandpa Joe always made coffee at 7 a.m. without fail, a lot of times people in a haunted house will report things like in my house where my sister constantly saw that man walk through the hallway. That would be a residual. That’s kind of what you feel when you go to Centralia—you feel these memories of happy times, sad times. You just feel the echoes of those people and those families, and then you look around and realize nothing’s there.”

Many people agree there is something there at the famous house in Amityville, though there isn’t consensus on what that thing is. Weidman and the REAL FEAR team interviewed Christopher Lutz, the youngest member of the family who fled their residence after only 28 days. “I can’t say too much,” Weidman relates, “but basically, he claims that things did happen in the house growing up, but it wasn’t what the media portrayed it as, and a lot of that had to do with his stepfather taking a lot of very intense meditation, where certain things were probably drawn in by that. It’s interesting, because I grew up hearing about this case, probably like everybody. I think everybody wants to know what really happened—is that possible?

“So it was fascinating to talk with Christopher, who was actually there and saw what happened and what didn’t happen, and get his take on the true story. It is widely believed that there were demonic spirits in there. I’ve worked with the original paranormal investigator on that case, and from what I’ve been told, it’s just a matter of time before something else happens in that house, meaning somebody experiences something paranormal. What’s interesting is, ever since the Lutzes moved out, nobody has claimed to have seen any kind of paranormal activity there.”

With POLTERGEIST, the origins lay with a boy, rather than the girl depicted in the movie. “William Roll, a very famous parapsychologist, was there, and researchers from Duke University and the Rhine Institute, which is a very famous paranormal research group. All these scientists, all these people, news reporters were there, and they still couldn’t figure out what was going on. Nobody had a natural explanation for this, and this [the 1950s] was a very conservative time, so I can only imagine what people watching these programs thought back then.

“There’s a theory in poltergeist activity that it’s not really a spirit—it’s the energy given off by somebody—called psychokinetic or PK energy, which is how it’s most commonly referred to—and basically the theory is that a young child, usually a girl about to hit puberty, is going through so many changes in her body that they’re actually causing the activity, so there’s no real ghost. When Roll came out there and started his theory and part of his research was this young boy, what he found was that he didn’t have an explanation for it. He couldn’t prove that the little boy was what we call the agent.”

As for THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, Weidman describes a sort of cultural schism regarding the Mothman in Point Pleasant, where some people believe it warns of catastrophes about to happen, others believe it causes the catastrophes and still others don’t believe he exists. “A lot of people describe it as a 6-foot, 7-foot creature,” Weidman says, “with huge wings, grayish color. The one description I loved the most described his eyes as being as red as the reflectors of a car, that bright and that red. Everybody has their theories on what happened and on what the Mothman is.

“It’s kind of a touchy subject,” she continues, “because of course the Silver Bridge collapsed and around that time period was when the Mothman was last seen, and so when you bring it up, you find some people who really don’t want to talk about it, because it’s a small town and 46 people died [in the bridge collapse]. Everybody knew somebody. It’s interesting, because you go to the town and there’s a Mothman diner, there are Mothman action figures in all the stores, there’s a statue in the center of town, and of course there’s the Mothman Museum. So they embrace it, but it’s also something that, when you bring up the bridge part, people don’t really want to get into it.”

In trying to uncover the truth behind what have become pop-culture myths, Weidman acknowledges with a laugh that REAL FEAR could be likened to a scary version of 60 MINUTES. “People who are interested in the stories, even if they don’t know the full stories but they’ve seen the movies, will get some answers as to why they really occurred.”

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features