WARNING: These are not for the faint of heart, and #1 will be just about the most disgusting thing you've ever heard.

It's obvious why we love horror movies: They distract us from the fact that real life can be much, much more terrifying. And we don't mean in the sense that cancer and heart disease are scarier than some flamboyant slasher movie villain. We mean that real-life murderers are in fact quite a bit more over-the-top than even the cheesiest B-movie bad guys, as the real monsters on this list prove.

5 The Snowtown Murders Create a Gruesome Tourist Mecca

Sunday Telegraph

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Back in the early 1990s, a trio of South Australian lowlifes from the impoverished suburb of Snowtown, near Adelaide, decided that a good ol' murder spree might help them feel better about their own craptastic lives. It began when the ringleader, John Bunting, decided that he'd had enough of pedophiles skulking around the community, and by damn, he was going to do something about it.

But before you assume that he was just The Punisher of sexual predators, it's worth mentioning that he conflated pedophiles with homosexuals as though they were the same thing, and most of the people he suspected of being "rock spiders," as he called them, were based on flimsy evidence and hearsay. It seemed as though he, well, just kinda wanted to kill a bunch of people.

Lisa Thurston

"Bunch of perverts watching our school kids. They even have a sign for their club."

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After piecing together a wall chart of suspected deviants in his hometown, Bunting and his two accomplices went to work hacking up their neighbors.

The Snowtown killers took a macabre delight in their work, torturing and killing people to the soundtrack of Bunting's beloved 1994 Live album Throwing Copper. Bunting referred to the act of homicide as "smurfing," because in his words, "First you go blue, then you go poo." It wasn't long before they started dabbling in cannibalism, because shit, why not? Bunting and his cronies disposed of the bodies of the people they smurfed by stuffing them into barrels of hydrochloric acid and hiding them in an abandoned bank building. When authorities finally discovered the most horrifying safety deposit vault in history, they had to go to creative efforts to figure out just how many bodies there were, such as counting all the toes and dividing by 10.