Welcome back to Reel Horror! Today, we’re looking at the case that inspired “The Strangers”: Charles Manson and the Tate-LaBianca Murders.
Charles Manson was born on November 12th, 1934, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Ada Kathleen Maddox, an unmarried 16-year-old. She later married William Eugene Manson, though the couple divorced in 1939. His early life was unstable: his mother was frequently absent or incarcerated, and Charles was shuffled between relatives and reform schools for much of his childhood. He spent the better part of his teens and twenties cycling in and out of prison. After the divorce, he took his stepfather’s surname due to Maddox’s neglect.
Once free, Manson made his way to San Francisco at the height of the Summer of Love. He drew on a patchwork of biblical teachings and Scientology and established himself as a guru in Haight-Ashbury. He assembled a group of mostly young, primarily female followers who came to be known as the Manson Family. The group eventually settled at Spahn Ranch, a former movie set on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where Manson developed an apocalyptic belief system that he called Helter-Skelter, after the Beatles song of the same name. Manson preached that a race war was imminent and that the Family would need to trigger it themselves to maintain the upper hand.
On the night of August 8th, 1969, Manson sent four of his followers — Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel, later joined by Linda Kasabian as the driver — to 10050 Cielo Drive in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles. The house was the rented home of film director Roman Polanski and his wife, actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant at the time. Polanski was in London for work. The choice of the house was not random: Manson knew the property’s former tenant, music producer Terry Melcher, and had reportedly been rejected by the music industry despite believing his talent warranted stardom.
The victims that night were Sharon Tate, 26; celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring, 35; heiress Abigail Folger, 25; Folger’s boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski, 32; and Steven Parent, 18, a friend of the property’s caretaker who had the misfortune of being present when the killers arrived. Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel killed all five. Tate, who pleaded for the life of her unborn child, was the last to die. The murders were intentionally staged to be shocking and chaotic, intended to instill widespread fear and ignite the race war Manson had envisioned. The following night, the Family struck again at the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
The city of Los Angeles, already on edge following the 1965 Watts riots, was thrown into a state of paranoia. The killers had not been caught and the motive was completely unknown. Wealthy residents hired private security, gun sales spiked, and fear settled into the hills of Hollywood like a fog. The killers were not identified until December 1969, following Atkins’ jail cell confession. Manson, Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel were convicted in 1971. Manson died in prison on November 19th, 2017, at the age of 83.
In interviews, writer and director Bryan Bertino has described two primary inspirations for The Strangers. The first was a childhood memory of strangers coming to his door asking for someone who did not live there; he later learned that homes in the neighborhood had been burglarized that same night. The second was the Tate murders. What haunted Bertino was the perceived randomness with which the Family chose their victims, and that aspect became the spine of his film: when the protagonist asks one of the killers why they are terrorizing her, she receives the simple answer “Because you were home.”
The film was released on May 30th, 2008, to a strong box office performance, earning over $82 million worldwide against a budget of roughly $9 million. Critics were divided, but audiences responded viscerally to the film’s slow-burn tension and its refusal to explain or humanize its villains. The Strangers was followed by a sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night, in 2018, and a Shudder reboot series launched in 2024.
Gothic Bite Magazine 