This dissertation is
presented in part fulfilment of the BA (Hons) Film and Media with Practice,
2015.
Table of Contents -
-
Abstract.
-
Chapter
1: Introduction.
-
Chapter
2: Urban legends and their meanings.
i.
The
Bunny Man.
ii.
The
tainted Halloween candy legend.
iii.
The
babysitter and the man upstairs and the clown statue legends.
iv.
The
kidney heist.
v.
Bloody
Mary.
-
Chapter
3: Translation from written word to image.
- Conclusion.
-
Bibliography.
Abstract.
The
accompanying photographic project is an exploration of urban legends in
American culture and their deeper meaning on a societal level. The images seek to parallel the often-grotesque
ambiguity of urban legends with the iconic conventions of horror, inspired
through film and literature. I set out
to illustrate the urban legends through small narratives or single stand alone
images. Symbolically, the images are a manifestation of our own fears as a
society that are pragmatically implied through urban mythology, whilst also
seeking to observe these fears from an alternative perspective and challenge
preconceptions.
Chapter 1.
Introduction.
The
perpetuation of urban legends within American culture is a direct reflection of
the cultural fears and anxieties of the current social climate within the
country during the time that each individual urban legend originates from. For this dissertation, I have explored a
number of urban legends and their deeper social meanings through the medium of
photography, whilst incorporating elements of horror inspired images and the
grotesque. A significant part of my work was my desire to incorporate horror
imagery into the images. I feel that horror and urban legends go hand in hand
and often crossover and there is a vast number of films and literature that
adapts urban legends into a horror format. Alongside photography work and urban
legend literature, I began to look into horror films such as Urban Legend
(1998) and Alice, Sweet Alice (1976) as sources of inspiration.
I
am intrigued by the nature of urban legends and the way in which they permeate
mainstream culture. Initially, I cast my net wide and looked at urban legends
as a subject matter but alas, this was far too. With every country in the world
creating its own folklore and myths, the notion of selecting a few was
inconceivable. I knew I must settle on a single country, so eventually settled
on the USA, with many of the legends originating from there being among the
most famous and well circulated urban legends such as ‘Bloody Mary’ and ‘The
Babysitter and the Man Upstairs’.
During
the course of my research, I have sought to deduce the place that urban legends
occupy within our culture and why they are perpetuated. Simultaneously, I want
to challenge the conventions of the legends, which are often thinly veiled allegories
towards contemporary societal issues.
Chapter 2.
Urban legends and their
meanings.
Urban
legends began as short stories, spread by word of mouth. With the advent of the
Internet, legends began to spread via chain emails and Internet forums,
furthering their global reach. Their meaning becomes distorted, like a Chinese
whisper, changing minor details until the outcome is unrecognizable. But what I
really wanted to investigate over the course of my research was why.
Why do these legends spread? What do we gain from spreading them? And
most importantly, why do they start in the first place and for what purpose?
Jan
Harold Brunvand, an author of numerous collections of urban legends and a constant
source of inspiration, states “urban legends are scary when they combine horror
fiction with the deals of real life. In typical urban legends you encounter
shocks such as lurking criminals, threatening maniacs, vague unknown dangers,
faulty products & isolated victims, all set in the context of everyday
life” (Brunvand, J. 2004. Page 10).
This statement by Brunvand significantly influenced the direction my
creative work has taken. The idea of the distortion of everyday life is a theme
that is present throughout the images. Something
I really wanted to magnify was the idea that mundane details of our day-to-day
existence could be sinister.
i.
The Bunny Man legend.
As
I began to dig deeper into the world of urban legends, I became transfixed with
a few in particular. I knew from the offset of this project that I would
eventually have to narrow down my options and select a few specific urban
legends to focus on. My first selection from my research was the story of the
“bunny man”. The first aspect of this
story is the fact that it is so localized within it’s retelling, which is
unusual for urban legends, which are often so broadly spread by so many
different individuals that the locations featured within the story are often hugely
differentiating depending on the version of the story and where it is being
told.
The
Bunny Man story on the other hand, is relatively pinned to two locations, the states
of Maryland and Virginia (in Maryland, the legend is associated with Maryland
Bridge, whilst in Virginia it is associated with a bridge under the train
tracks of Fairfax Station). In the legend of the Bunny Man, a killer in a
rabbit costume wielding an axe murders people who pass by the bridge that the
Bunny Man is living under. In some instances, the Bunny Man is motivated by his
own family being massacred on Easter Sunday, thus the bunny guise. While in
others, the motivation of the killer is unknown. In some telling’s, it has even been alleged
that the Bunny Man is the escaped patient of a local mental institution
As
I previously mentioned, a key aspect of what I was trying to explore through my
research and my subsequent images, was the sheer purpose of the legends in the
first place. In the case of the Bunny Man, I was perplexed as to what place
exactly a story about a man in a rabbit costume wielding an axe would occupy
within the mythos of a certain location. The motivation behind the legend was ambiguous
and perplexing, which only furthered my interest. It begs the question, why as humans are we so
intrigued with dark stories? Morbid curiosity is certainly a contributing
factor, alongside our underlying salient desires to understand the unknown.
Blank states that “although the Bunny Man is
not restricted to bridges in Maryland oral tradition, the Bunny Man legend
proliferates in the same rural or suburban settings where complementary bridge
narratives also thrive. The Bunny Man legend melds with Maryland Bridge and
creature legends to make rural, secluded areas unsettling. (Blank, T. 2014, Page 59). Upon reading this, I started to contemplate
the idea of the legends being born from primordial, deeply instilled fears, in
this case; isolation. Freud (1926, cited in Erwin, E. 2002) argues that
isolation is a defense mechanism that creates a feeling of safety. With this
notion in mind, the theme of isolation and perceived safety became more
apparent as an underlying theme in several other urban legends that I was
researching. Safety is regarded as such
a core human need, so any affront to this is a strong basis for a story that
will be passed on from sheer fear.
ii.
The tainted Halloween candy legend.
In
essence, pragmatic suggestion of a false sense of security runs at the heart of
the vast majority of urban legends. It’s the violation of the equilibrium of a
seemingly idealistic everyday life that makes the stories powerful and gives it
the element of reliability that is required for a story to permeate the minds
of those it is passed on to, instigating them to spread the legend further. I
found this to be particularly pertinent when I was looking into the “tainted
Halloween candy” legend. The tainted Halloween candy plays off the paranoia of
parents allowing their children to go trick-or-treating on Halloween night, with
numerous news outlets in America publishing warnings about poisoned Halloween
confectionary and razor blades in apples being given out to trick-or-treaters,
with reports on the topic dating back to as early as the 1950s, shortly after
trick-or-treating and Halloween began to gain momentum as a commercially viable
outlet. The fear that exists at the
heart of this story can be seen as being rooted in death. It forces its
audience to contemplate a fear of annihilation and their own finite mortality.
These
alleged crimes became known by media outlets as “Halloween sadism”. In a study undertaken by Joel Best, an
analysis of the number of Halloween sadism stories published between 1958 and
1989 in several American newspapers, the number of reported tainted
confectionary cases spiked in 1971 and 1982 (Best, 1993). Incidentally, both of these years coincided
with national news coverage on the subject of two high profile poisonings. “In 1970, Kevin Touston died from ingesting
heroin alleged to be in his Halloween treats. It was later discovered that he
had found the heroin in his uncle’s home, not in the candy” (De Vos, G. 1996.
Page 69). The fact that this incident occurred around Halloween could certainly
be a cause for the creation of this urban legend. It is entirely plausible that
this story could’ve been spread and rehashed into different forms until it
became the tainted Halloween candy legend, as is the nature of oral
storytelling tradition. It’s directly linked to Halloween, despite the fact
that it was later proven that the heroin was separate to the candy; it still
links the concept of Halloween and children dying due to ingestion of harmful
substances. The details of the story could’ve easily become lost in the shuffle
of the moral panic surrounding it.
In
the case of the spike in reported cases in 1982, in the September of 1982 there
was a series of deaths related to tainted painkillers. That September, several
people in the city of Chicago, Illinois were killed by a tainted batch of over
the counter painkiller Tylenol. The Tylenol was laced with cyanide and it is
believed that the poison had to have been added during the distribution of the
product due to the localised nature of the crime. The case still remains
unsolved (Milhorn, 2005). The fact that the figures spiked following the years
where these two incidents took place is something I cannot fathom as
coincidental. Cases like this are the basis that the tainted candy legend
needed to grow. Paranoia is a powerful thing, especially when children are
factored into the equation.
“In general, urban legends are products
of social tension or strain. They express fears that the complexities of modern
society threaten the traditional social order” (Fine, 1980 cited in Bennett, G.
2013. Page 119).
iii.
The babysitter and the man upstairs & the clown statue legends.
As
so often the case is with urban legends, these two urban legends have become
run together over the course of time and their narratives have become
intertwined. The nature of the way the stories are told makes this an
inevitability, with embellishments from every individual who tells the story of
an urban legend potentially becoming gospel. This is true in the case of The
Babysitter and the Man Upstairs. I first happened upon this legend watching the
1979 slasher film When A Stranger Calls (1979) in which the opening scene tells
the a version of the story.
The babysitter and the man upstairs tells the
story of a young teenage girl who is babysitting for a family (in many
versions, the family of a rich doctor). The parents leave and the girl goes
about her evening, not disturbing the child as the parents informed her that
they are already sleeping. A few hours into the evening and the girl receives a
call, with someone breathing heavily on the other end. She dismisses it as
nothing until receiving a second call asking her why she hasn’t checked on the
children. Assuming it is the doctor, she calls the parents at their location
and they inform her that it wasn’t them who made the call. Panicked, the girl
begins to look outside. She receives several further calls, asking why she
hasn’t checked the children. She then tells the unknown caller to stop the
prank, before phoning the police. The police agree to track the call. She then
receives another call, with the caller saying he can see her, but the girl,
confident the police are handling the situation, calmly puts the phone down.
The police ring immediately after the call and inform her that the call is
coming from inside the house. The girl panics and runs upstairs, to find the
children dead. In some versions the girl does not ring the police and is
subsequently killed by the man upstairs herself.
The
clown statue legend is very similar to that of the babysitter and the man
upstairs: the premise is the same, a young girl babysitting while the child’s
(or sometimes children’s) parents go out for the evening. In the clown statue
story, the babysitter hears the child crying upstairs. She rings the parents
after checking on the child and assures them everything is fine and that the
child was probably just scared by their clown statue, to which the parents
respond, “We don’t have a clown statue”. Again, this legend has numerous
versions and outcomes. The legend itself
can be traced back to the 1970s in America and I see it as a response to the
mistrust of strangers and the paranoia based around more women working and
leaving the home. This story can also be seen as a realization of a clown
phobia, deeply set in our psyches. A fear of the uncanny and also a violation
of something that can be perceived as a symbol of childhood and innocence.
I
also see the clown statue legend as a response to something slightly more
sinister. As with the link between the
tainted Halloween candy and the Tylenol murders, I believe that the clown
statue legend also finds some of its basis in real world events.
“John
Wayne Gacy Jr. (1942 – 1994) was an American serial killer who was responsible
for the sex-related slayings of 33 young men and teenage boys between 1972 and
1978” (Miller, W. 2012. Page 661). The reason John Wayne Gacy is relevant to
the clown statue legend because of his media persona during his persecution.
Gacy had a clown alter ego named Pogo The Clown. Pogo The Clown entertained in
children’s hospitals and also hosted neighborhood parties. Following the
conviction of Gacy, when the bodies of his victims were found under his home, a
wave of hysteria hit America, sparking debate on background checks for
individuals that are allowed access to children. All the while, the image of
Pogo The Clown appeared alongside these stories, emblazoning itself on the
minds of those who saw it.
I
see Pogo the Clown as a manifestation of contemporary suburban fear. Gacy was
integrated within the community and managed to maintain a believably normal
persona for several years before being caught. Really, Gacy is a perfect
metaphor for urban legends themselves. The notion that something so deeply
malign could be lurking underneath the realms of everyday life is what makes
urban legends powerful. No matter the irrationality or the lack of
believability involved, people will instinctively wish to protect themselves
and others from harm and thus the stories gain momentum. Fear is like a
perpetual wormhole, vast and infinite.
iv.
The kidney heist
The
kidney heist became a popular urban legend in the early 1990s. It concerns a
businessman in a big city (often New York) who goes to a bar one night after
work. He strikes up a conversation with a woman and gets a round of drinks with
her. He wakes up the following morning in a bath filled with ice and a scar on
his stomach. He panics and finds a phone in the room to ring the police (or
sometimes an ambulance, depending on the version of the story) who inform him
that he has been a victim of a black market kidney-selling ring, and that the
woman who he was talking to spiked his drink so that his kidney could be
removed. The legend has gained mass exposure via the Internet, often appearing
in chain emails. “Some of the latest versions of “The Kidney Heist” circulating
in the United States included the names of medical of law enforcement personnel
(all of them phony) who had supposedly investigated the case” (Brunvand, J.
2012. Page 357).
As
with other urban legends that I have chosen to explore, the legend of the
kidney heist preys on paranoia. It is a fairly transparent warning about
strangers and also the spiking of drinks. Interestingly, the kidney heist is one of the
few legends where a woman is given the role of the antagonist.
“In The Kidney Heist, the woman is
portrayed as a phallic agent who violates the bodily integrity of man and
reduces him to (passive) meat, a donor of organs, in the course of what started
out as a sexual encounter.” (Gymnich, M.
2010. Page 260).
After
taking note of the idea of gender within the urban legends, I contemplated the
idea of incorporating a gender-based aspect to my work. By this, I mean that I
intended to alter the preconceived gender roles within the urban legends that I
am looking at and deconstructing them into something new. I wanted to re-live
the horror touched upon in the legends and reflect upon it, before interpreting
it into my own version based upon what I perceive as being the core meaning.
v.
Bloody Mary.
Perhaps
the most well known urban legend that I have chosen to focus on over the course
of my research is Bloody Mary. The most commonly known telling of Bloody Mary
is the story of a blood covered woman appearing in the mirror if an individual
says “Bloody Mary” in the mirror three times. The origins of Bloody Mary can be traced back to
Queen Mary I of England, dubbed “Bloody Mary” due to the mass executions that
occurred during her time on the throne. In some versions of the legend, Mary will
appear just as a floating head, alluding to the beheadings that Queen Mary I
sanctioned during her reign. “A Freudian rather than a historical gloss on the
headless image might construe the loss of a “maiden head” as a symbol of lost
virginity, a loss in which the breaking of the hymen could result in blood flowing”
(Dundes, A. 2002. Page 85).
The
Bloody Mary legend is particularly popular among teenagers and young adults. In
some ways, the legend can be seen as a metaphor for menstruation and the idea
of woman as a witch, which dates back to the 1600s. Much like the protagonist in
the Brian De Palma film Carrie (1976), in which Carrie White discovers her
telekinetic powers whilst also getting her first period. The parallels between
adolescence and the Bloody Mary legend are interwoven in such a way that the motivations
behind this legend are at least somewhat transparent. Blood can also be seen as
a symbol of power. Linking back to the underlying themes of horror, blood is
utilized as a horror device due to its symbolic meaning as a life force. To see
blood is to open our bodies and see the visceral contents within.
In
other versions of the legend, teenage girls chant “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary,
Bloody Mary” into the mirror and the image of their future husband will
allegedly appear in the mirror. On the other hand, if Bloody Mary appears in
the mirror, the girl who she appears for will die before marriage. In another
version, a girl who has “sinned” will have their face scratched by Bloody Mary,
marking them as a sinner. Again, this
links into the idea of adolescence and female sexuality and also incorporates a
religious element to the legend, with “Mary” perhaps alluding to Mary
Magdalene.
Chapter 3.
Translation from written
word to image.
As
previously stated, my intention with my images was to blend together the core
stories of the urban legends alongside imagery inspired by horror cinema,
whilst also experimenting with the tropes and conventions of the legends and
remoulding them into my own telling of the legends, much in the way the stories
have been re-told and re-imagined by innumerable individuals for years.
In
my first shoot, in which I first began to explore the Bunny Man legend, I
thought about the version of the legend, the Bunny Man as the escaped patient
of a mental institution. The main draw of this particular story to me is the
ambiguity of such a scene. There is an eerie stillness to the image, which
hints at something evil within.
In terms of incorporating gothic
horror elements into the images, a number of photographers and writers have
proved to be significant in the research process. ‘Gothic Dreamscapes’ (2011) By Patrick E. Flanagan is
collection of gothic images and short texts by photographer and poet Patrick E.
Flanagan. The book looks at everyday life and mundane situations through a
bleak, morbid perspective. The images are intensely gothic and menacing, with
beautifully dark subjects often cast against a bright white contrast.
The idea
of analysing the distortion of real life is something previously mentioned in
this reflection, but ‘Gothic Dreamscapes’ has further influenced this idea.
Flanagan and his work deliver the perspective of real life as morbid and dark,
which is certainly relevant to the images being developed for this dissertation
and links well with the often dark and depraved aspects of urban legends. Gothic imagery is something I explored within
my own images, often opting for grey scale and black and white images. The realism and grounded aspect of the work of
Flanagan also impacted the way in which I approached the images I have created.
Despite my intention to incorporate aspects of surrealism and horror into my
images, I still wanted the narratives I was creating to be very much grounded
within the realms of reality. I perceive the true horror (and subsequently, the
power) of urban legends to be the fact that they feel so close to real life and
that they become a tangible force of paranoia and dread.
In the
middle ground between gothic horror and the grotesque, the photography book
‘Heaven to Hell’ (2006) by David LaChapelle is a collection of photo shoots
taken by LaChapelle. In ‘Heaven to Hell’, LaChapelle explores scenes of a
horrific nature (violent scenes are present throughout) counterbalanced against
gaudy bright colour schemes, extravagant set pieces and surrealism, giving a feel
of the grotesque and the uncanny. The garishly colourful tone of his work
combined with the more sinister undertones of his images have served as a
significant source of inspiration.
“Heaven to Hell” is a collection of images taken by LaChapelle, mostly
of celebrities. The images are intensely sharp and bright, contrasted against
the often-dark subject matter that is being touched upon in the image. The work
in ‘Heaven to Hell’ also touches upon themes of Americana and the symbolism of
particular objects, colours and imagery. In my tainted
Halloween candy images, I placed the razor blade covered apple in a bowl of
brightly coloured sweets. In an attempt
to establish a narrative flow between the two images, the subsequent image
features the same apple covered in blood.
The contrast of colours within the images reminds me of that used by
LaChapelle. The contrast can be seen as the tension of apposing forces. A
pushing and pulling of different energies. The binary opposites of light and
dark and the ambiguity of the grey area in-between.
In terms of looking at elements of
the grotesque within existing works, “Modern American grotesque: literature and
photography” by James Goodwin proved to be an insightful look at grotesque
photography, whilst the literature included in the book has also served as an
influence when visualising the final images. Goodwin suggests that (when
discussing works of literature and photography that feature elements of the
grotesque) that “they engage at obvious levels of manipulation of perspective
and forms to deepen one’s recognition of incongruity and/or to intensify ones
psychological response.” (Goodwin, J.
2009. Page 1013). Incongruity is a theme that runs through my own images,
illustrating something that doesn’t quite fit within the realm it has been
placed within.
(Figures 8 & 9 - Bloody Mary, 2015)
Following
the theme of incongruity, I set out taking my final Bloody Mary images with the
intention of blurring the pre-established gender roles within the urban legend.
I wanted to dispel the idea of “woman as a witch” by posing for the images
myself and altering the gender lines.
The Bloody Mary legend is in essence a fear of invasion. We look into
the mirror to what we believe is a true image of ourselves, so to see Bloody
Mary staring back is a direct violation of this. Mary is an underlying self-shadow that exists
within, unexposed to the outside world, revealing herself only in the mirror.
Conclusion.
When
I consider the research I have undertaken over the course of this project, be
it film based, literature or images by other photographers, I can see a clear
parallel between my initial findings and my own creative output. I set out to
create narratives that illustrate urban legends, whilst incorporating horror
elements and elements of analysis regarding the truth behind what these stories
of American folklore actually mean on a societal and psychological level. In
the instances of the tainted Halloween candy legend, the Bunny Man, the kidney
heist and the clown statue, I wanted to emphasize the fact that the legend
really could happen.
“These
fears may have some basis in social and political reality; that the world is increasingly
without guardianship and does contain elements of social disintegration”
(Donavan, P. 2003. Page 174). Taking the
lines of reality and fiction and blending them as one whilst picking apart
various aspects of the fictional narratives (e.g. The gender aspect of the
Bloody Mary images) is something that I developed along the way. Over the
course of shooting images, new ideas began to present themselves, all becoming
a part of what is present in my final images. The exploration of fear and
anxiety is a necessity of the human condition. To go without this is to
repress. In my images, my intention was to further illustrate these fears that
had only been pragmatically suggested within the written and spoken versions of
the urban legends.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
WRITTEN REFLECTION
LITERATURE
Jan
Harold Brunvand (2004). Be Afraid, be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary
Urban Legends. W. W. Norton & Company: New York.
Blank, T (2014). Maryland Legends:
Folklore from the Old Line State. South Carolina: The History Press.
Erwin, E. (2002). ITALY AND
PSYCHOANALYSIS. In: Erwin, E The Freud Encyclopaedia: Theory, Therapy,
and Culture. London: Routledge.
Bennett,
G (2013). Contemporary Legend: A Reader. London: Routledge.
Best, J. (1993). FEARS AND FOLKLORE. In:
Best, J Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims.
Chicago: The University Press of Chicago. p132-133.
De Vos, G (1996). Tales, Rumors,
and Gossip: Exploring Contemporary Folk Literature in Grades 712: Exploring
Contemporary Folk Literature . Connecticut : Greenwood Publishing
Group Inc.
Milhorn, H.
(2005). Laced With Cyanide. In: Milhorn, H Crime: Computer Viruses to
Twin Towers. Florida: Universal Publishers.
Miller, W
(2012). The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopaedia.
New York: SAGE Publications.
Brunvand,
J (2012). Encyclopaedia of Urban Legends. 2nd ed. California:
ABC-CLIO.
Gymnich, M
(2010). Gendered (Re)Visions: Constructions of Gender in Audiovisual
Media. Göttingen: V&R unipress GmbH.
Dundes, A
(2002). Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic
Folkloristics. Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press.
Flanagan, P
(2011). Gothic Dreamscapes. New York: Dark Keep Publishing.
LaChapelle, D
(2006). David LaChapelle: Heaven
to Hell. Germany: Taschen.
Goodwin, J
(2009). Modern American grotesque: literature and photography.
Ohio: Ohio State University Press.
Donovan,
P (2004). No Way of Knowing: Crime, Urban Legends and the Internet.
New York: Routledge.
FILMS
When A Stranger
Calls. Hollywood: Fred Walton. 1979. DVD.
Carrie.
Hollywood: Brian De Palma, 1976. DVD.
Alice, Sweet
Alice. Hollywood: Alfred Sole. 1976. DVD.
Urban
Legend. Hollywood: Jamie Blanks. 1998. DVD.
