Before The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson made a film about two teenage girls and a real murder. One of those girls grew up to become a world-famous crime novelist.

In HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994), Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme develop an obsessive friendship and create an elaborate shared fantasy world. Fearing their parents will separate them, they plot to kill Pauline's mother.

A psychological drama based on the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in New Zealand, the film lures the viewer into a secret world of wonder and heightened emotion. You understand the killing not as evil but as a logical endpoint, the last brick in the wall around a sealed, private kingdom.

Up to this point, Peter Jackson was not known for subtlety. His brand consisted of zombies, puppet sex, and a splatter comedy whose climactic massacre is carried out with a lawnmower. Here, the New Zealand gore merchant revealed a register nobody knew he had.

Its two leads were unknowns. Melanie Lynskey was a New Zealand schoolgirl pulled in from nowhere. The other, cast as Juliet Hulme, was an English teenager named Kate Winslet.

The actual Juliet Hulme served her sentence, then vanished and reinvented herself. The world would later know her as bestselling crime novelist Anne Perry.