Supernatural horror inspiration: The real story of Josef Fritzl
Supernatural has taken inspiration from various tales in history. In Season 4, one of those tales was extremely recent.
Supernatural Season 4, Episode 11 gave us a creepy tale of incest and torture. A woman had been locked away in her home and raped repeatedly by her father. Like many tales in the series, this one was inspired from real stories and possibly one extremely recent at the time of writing and filming.
At one point, there’s a mention of the 2008 case when Josef Fritzl had been arrested. The police found his daughter had been locked in her home for 24 years and repeatedly raped, leading to the birth of multiple children.
Ring any bells? Here’s a look at the Supernatural tale and the inspiration from the headlines.
Family Remains
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During Season 4, Episode 11, titled “Family Remains,” the Winchesters head to a house they believed was haunted. It was an understandable assumption. A man had been killed at home, a home locked from the inside. Something from the inside had to have killed him and usually, that means vengeful or violent spirit.
It turned out the murder wasn’t by a spirit but by two people still in the house. Those people were children of the man murdered. They were also grandchildren. Yes, the man had raped his daughter repeatedly and she’d had two children because of it.
The real tale of Josef Fritzl
It’s not often that the series takes a tale from the current headlines. This is what made “Family Remains” stand out among all the others in the earlier seasons. While there have been many other tales of incest, children locked in their homes, and other forms of abuse, the Fritzl case was prominent at the time.
Josef Fritzl was a seemingly ordinary Austrian man. However, 24 years before the big event, his daughter, Elizabeth, had gone missing. Her mother had called the police and the police searched for her. Later, Elizabeth sent a letter to say that she’d left home and Josef claimed that maybe Elizabeth had joined a cult. He claimed he didn’t know where she was.
How false that was. Josef had lured his daughter into an insulated and soundproofed room and locked her in there. Her mother had no idea and believed the story that she’d run away.
Over the course of 24 years, Elizabeth gave birth to five children, three of whom remained with her and others who would live with Josef and his wife. Josef went to the elaborate plan of arranging for the babies to be found with a note from “Elizabeth” to say that she couldn’t raise the children herself and they would be better with the family.
It was all found out because Elizabeth’s eldest daughter, Kerstin, fell ill and needed to be taken to the hospital. Police became suspicious and Josef eventually let his daughter leave. Of course, she was questioned by the police and told them the tale, everything that had happened to her over the course of 24 years.
The ending is vastly different to Supernatural, but it’s easy to see where the inspiration came from. In “Family Remains,” the daughter never escaped and ended up killing herself. Nobody official ever learned the truth until after the children inside the walls were found.
Next. Are ghosts the go-to for monster-of-the-week episodes?. dark
Did you know of the real inspiration behind “Family Remains?”
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