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Colleen Stan Lifetime Movie – ‘Girl In The Box’ Premieres Tonight – Zelda Williams Plays Role In True Story Of Surviving Seven Years Of Torture

By Janice Malcolm
Published on: 11:01 PST, Sep 10, 2016

The latest Lifetime movie, Girl in the Box, is scheduled to premiere tonight, September 10, at 8 p.m. ET and will tell the tale of a young girl who is taken hostage in 1977 and abused for seven years while kept imprisoned inside of a small box. The attachment of Zelda Williams, daughter of the late great Robin Williams, has generated a lot of buzz, but the fact that the horrific and torturous depictions are based on the true story of Colleen Stan has been very shocking.

Between the years of 1977 to 1984, Colleen Stan was forced to live in a box beneath the bed of her captor, continuously tortured psychologically, even while her body was forced to be the vessel for his twisted and sadistic fantasies. Stan had even been forced to sign a contract giving her captor all rights to use her body as he saw fit. The movie Lifetime is scheduled to premiere tonight, 40 years after the deed, is based on the horrific experiences Colleen Stan was forced to endure at the hands of the people she had at first thought were helping her.

At the time of her capture, the 20-year-old had been hitchhiking as a pretty normal way to explore and was on her way to a friend’s party when the North Carolina woman was picked up by a friendly looking couple. KHOU wrote that Cameron and Janice Hooker offered Stan a ride and she accepted mainly because the couple had a child in the car, however, that did not stop them from kidnapping her. After a while they eventually pulled off the road though and Cameron Hooker locked the young woman in a wooden box.

When she arrived at the home of the Hookers, Colleen Stan was then forced to sign the contract to become Cameron’s sex slave and made to sleep beneath the bed in the wooden box where she was forced to spend almost all her days. In 1984, she finally got enough freedom to escape the home. Later, at the trial, Janice Hooker testified against her husband in exchange for immunity. The Inquisitr wrote that Janice Hooker had actually confessed to her pastor about the kidnapping around the same time Stan escaped.

Cameron Hooker is currently still serving a 104-year sentence after being put on trial for sexual assault, as well as kidnapping.

The Girl in the Box will be the directorial and writing debut of Stephen Kemp. The movie will also be the darkest role that Zelda Williams has taken on — where she will be playing Janice Hooker; the rest of the main cast includes Addison Timlin as Colleen Stan, and Zane Holtz as Cameron Hooker.

After the movie airs on Lifetime, they will also debut a documentary called Colleen Stan: The Girl in the Box, which focuses on the experiences of the tortured young woman. For those who wish to stream the movie, Lifetime has a streaming service available on MyLifetime.com if you sign in through your cable provider. The Lifetime App also can be used to view movies; the app is for Apple TV and Roku.

Colleen Stan said that she has not seen the movie as yet, but had the opportunity to visit the cast during filming, while they were on set. She has also stated that she is actually unsure if she will be watching the debut or taping it to watch later, but either way, she will not have to watch Girl in the Box alone.

“I may watch it that night, a couple of my friends have said they’ll come over and watch it with me. One is my psychiatrist and he said he’d come over and watch it with me. I’ll probably cry when I watch it. It looks pretty intense.”

Stan said that she mostly saw Addision Timlin while she was filming torture scenes in the basement, naked, gagged, blindfolded and handcuffed and it was a state that the young woman was in for several hours of the day because taking them off in between scenes “would take too much time.” Stan says she mainly survived those torturous days by doing her best to go to a safe place in her mind, a place where she was just enjoying life with her friends and family.

Stan says she never screamed during any of the times Cameron Hooker was torturing her, because he threatened to cut her vocal cords, a deed, he said, he had done before. After her escape and his subsequent trial, it was learned that before Colleen Stan was in the Hooker’s house as a sex slave, there had been another girl named Marie Elizabeth Spannakee, and to this day, her body has never been found.

Colleen says that one of the reasons she is looking forward to the airing of her story through Lifetime’s Girl in the Box is to show that, “there is still life after such a horrific event and I hope that is what my story is to people.”

[Image via Shutterstock]

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