Review by Quin
The amount of creative inspiration that can be drawn from urban legend seems never-ending. So many of our favorite horror films have a clear basis in urban legend, but when they are bad they really fall flat. The most obvious of the bad stuff is the straight-forward no-creativity-necessary entitled the Urban Legend franchise. But seriously, when you call your movie exactly what it is, red flags should go up all over the place for horror fans. If so much of our favorite (and not so favorite) fiction comes from urban legend, where do the legends themselves come from? After all, they are just legends, aren’t they? The new documentary from Joshua Zeman attempts to get to the bottom of this – presenting us with four well-known urban legends, aiming to figure out where these legends began and just how true they are.
Joshua Zeman previously made the excellent documentary Cropsey, which was about the Staten Island boogeyman legend of the 1970’s and 80’s which may have actually been a convicted kidnapper named Andre Rand; if it wasn’t, he did go to prison for it. Zeman’s latest, Killer Legends, is really an extension of Cropsey. The two films, while not connected per se, should definitely be viewed together. There is a difference in format and approach, but the subject matter in each of them is perfectly aligned. Both films start with an urban legend and connect it to bad things happening to real people. As a result, we have more of those cautionary tales heard from parents around the world – the ones that always go something like this… “You better not [insert bad deed here] or else [insert evil monster here] will get you!”
I think almost every town around the world has some urban legend in its history. I think we’ve all met people who have chimed into a conversation about such topics with, “Oh, that happened to someone a friend of mine knew.” It’s never, ever a first hand witness. We meet so many of these people in Killer Legends, and miraculously, they all want to be interviewed. Joshua Zeman travels to four different towns in America, looking for these people and he finds them. He brings with him a researcher named Rachel Mills, whose IMDb credits include production in reality television. Unlike the Cropsey documentary, Zeman puts himself and Mills right in the middle of Killer Legends. We don’t just hear voice-overs, we see them knocking on doors with looks on their faces that seem to convey the feeling that they are making this up as they go along. This is actually pretty interesting; so many documentaries have an agenda, but if it’s authentic, it will find its thesis somewhere along the way and hopefully it will jump out and surprise the filmmaker as well as the viewer. With this approach, you run the risk of things going horribly wrong. They’re just traipsing through neighborhoods, and occasionally telling people for the first time, “Hey did you know this really horrible and tragic thing happened in your house?” Yikes! This takes a tremendous amount of guts, but Texas, Missouri and Illinois seem surprisingly friendly to these two and their camera crew.
I realize it’s taken me a while to get to the actual urban legends discussed in the film, and I don’t really want to say too much about them, but they are all big ones that you’ve heard of – the man with the hook, poisoned halloween candy, the babysitter, and killer clowns. Two were turned into movies. The hook man first became the 1976 film The Town that Dreaded Sundown. It’s a pretty intense film about a killer on the loose in a small town. It actually pre-dates Halloween by two years and the killer sports a similar look to Jason Voorhees in the original Friday the 13th, before he picked up the hockey mask. So, as you can see, the tentacles of this legend have reached far into the slasher film genre. A remake of The Town that Dreaded Sundown is actually scheduled for release this year. The babysitter legend was turned into a short film called The Sitter by director Fred Walton. In 1979, he expanded it into the feature film When a Stranger Calls. That film eventually spawned a made-for-cable sequel in the early 90’s called When A Stranger Calls Back as well as a remake in 2006. There would be no Scream 1 through 4 without this legend.
The killer clown segment is the weakest and least interesting of the bunch. Zemen tries to connect it to serial killer John Wayne Gacy, but all they really have in common are Chicago and clown makeup. It’s probably a coincidence. But this brings home the point that urban legends are just warnings that are based in reality and the truth is so terrifying that we need to invent legends. The legend of the poisoned Halloween candy is the most chilling. I think it’s the one that almost everyone relates to on a personal level. I remember having my candy checked for pin holes and signs of tampering. My neighborhood was mostly people that my family knew, but there was still a slight bit of paranoia brought on by the media at the time. But what Zeman and Mills uncover in Pasadena, Texas is astonishing. It’s amazing that they haven’t cancelled Halloween forever there.
Overall what we have here is a very thoughtful and interesting documentary. It will entertain you, creep you out and you will probably learn some history along the way. But the most fascinating thing of all to me, is how all of these legends spread without the use of the internet. In the past, something tragic would happen and through word of mouth and through the media, these stories would grow. I almost think that with the internet and the current state of our collective short attention spans, there is less chance of our society being able to create new cautionary tales for our children. Maybe because the tragedy is no longer experienced by a friend of a friend of a friend. We all see it first hand on the news every single day. The truth is more terrifying than legends.
Killer Legends was originally shown on The Chiller Network. It’s now available for download through iTunes from Gulp Pictures and Storyville Entertainment in association with Gigantic Pictures. It’s also available on Region 1 DVD through Breaking Glass Pictures.