Tracing the Real Origins of ‘Wrong Turn’ and Its Backwoods Cannibals

The question of whether ‘Wrong Turn’ is based on a true story has trailed the horror series for years. The 2003 film follows a group of young travelers whose choice to take a side road through the West Virginia wilderness places them in the path of three inbred cannibals. It is the kind of premise that invites speculation about real events.

Tracing the origins of ‘Wrong Turn’ leads to two different stories. Screenwriter Alan B. McElroy has described a stressful night drive that planted the idea. Looper, meanwhile, has pointed to a centuries old Scottish legend as a likely parallel.

Is ‘Wrong Turn’ Based on a True Story

A reader question on a film errors site received the short answer that the series is simply fiction, resting at most on urban legend. The more useful question is where the premise actually came from.

In an anniversary feature, Entertainment Weekly spoke with McElroy, director Rob Schmidt and members of the cast about how the film came together. McElroy recalled that West Virginia’s tourist board administration denounced the film, and that the governor said it did not reflect the state. He said he took that as a sign the film had landed.

The West Virginia setting was also a production choice rather than a location. Schmidt filmed in a park north of Toronto and used green screen to remove skyscrapers visible behind the trees.

The Sawney Bean Legend Behind the Cannibal Family

Looper notes that there has never been a specific discussion of where McElroy found his idea, yet argues the similarities with the legend of Sawney Bean are too numerous to be coincidence. Bean is described as the subject of one of Scotland’s grisly tales, said to have been born in the 16th century and to have fled a comfortable life in East Lothian.

In the legend, Bean and a woman named Black Agnes Douglas raised a large family in a cave, where they ambushed travelers, killed them for their belongings and dismembered the bodies. The family is said to have grown larger through relationships among the children.

Accounts of the clan’s end differ, with one version having a mob sent by a king find preserved body parts in the cave, and others describing public executions or death by suffocation after gunpowder was placed at the entrance. Looper adds that the BBC reported Wes Craven read about the legend in the 1970s, which inspired him to write ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, giving that film and ‘Wrong Turn’ some shared roots.

Alan B. McElroy and the Road Trip Behind the Script

McElroy has said the seed came in the early 1990s, when he and his wife drove from their Ohio home toward a New York flight during a snowstorm and met a traffic jam that truckers warned could last 14 hours. They turned back and found a small side road to bypass the jam, and he remembers wondering in the dark, “Is this a smart idea?”

McElroy had broken through writing a ‘Halloween’ sequel in 1988 and later co-wrote ‘Spawn’. He first sketched a short film called ‘Blur’ about a bank robber whose car breaks down in the wilderness and who meets three mountain men. He wrote the feature script in three weeks after an executive suggested giving it a catchy title like ‘Wrong Turn’.

The project was announced in August 2001 with Summit Entertainment, Newmarket Group and producer Stan Winston, who suggested making the cannibal Three Finger smaller but more agile than the other two. German company Constantin Film later supplied much of the budget.

How the ‘Wrong Turn’ Franchise Kept Going

The film cost $12.6 million to make and earned $28.7 million worldwide. Its opening weekend in North America brought in about $5.2 million from 1,615 screens. McElroy said it was rushed out at the end of May rather than released closer to Halloween.

Entertainment Weekly critic Scott Brown wrote at the time that the film recycled familiar anti rural stereotypes, and Schmidt acknowledges the early reviews were not good. Audiences responded more warmly, with Schmidt recalling noisy theaters where kids imitated the laugh of Three Finger, performed by Julian Richings.

The 2003 film was followed by six more, including a 2021 reboot starring Matthew Modine. McElroy wrote that reboot, which dropped the original mythology and set city dwellers against an ancient Appalachian commune called the Foundation. Adam Nayman of The Ringer found it a richer experience than the first film, and McElroy says he planned two more entries to complete a trilogy. Now that the origins of ‘Wrong Turn’ point to both a snowstorm detour and a Scottish cave legend, which of those two stories do you think shaped Three Finger and his family more, and did the Foundation reboot capture it?