By honoring Hitchcock, URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT (2000) improves on its predecessor in every way
#31DaysOfHorror: October 11
This October, I’ll be reviewing 31 horror movies in 31 days! You can see the ongoing list of what I’ve watched and reviewed here.
The Plot
A film student is looking for an idea for her thesis film when she hears an urban legend about a killer who patterned their murders after urban legends. (In other words, she speaks to the guard from Urban Legend.)
While the student is filming her movie about a killer who kills based on urban legends, a killer kills her film crew in accordance with the urban legends being filmed. …Didja follow that?
My Review
Yesterday, in my review of Urban Legend, I criticized that film for not letting its characters be savvy enough about the familiar situations that they find themselves in to ever get ahead of the killer. In a post-Scream world, slashers about horror storytelling — which Urban Legend undoubtedly is — need to adapt to the fact that audiences are familiar with genre mechanics enough that they recognize when certain situations are repeating themselves. Especially if you have your characters researching the exact story that’s about to play out… they can’t not notice.
Thankfully, Urban Legends: Final Cut manages to avoid this pitfall by telling a story about horror filmmaking and not just folktale storytelling. Whereas the first installment in the franchise was about how urban legends circulate and deliver morals reflective of a society’s psyche, the sequel is about how horror films do the same. Yes, the central movie-within-the-movie is basically someone making a film of the first film. However, most of the actual murders in Final Cut — while they do take place concurrently with and inspired by scenes being filmed about urban legends — are inspired by horror films rather than the legends themselves. While it’s still a bit of a mess overall, making the connection between urban legends and horror movies more overt than the first film —in fact, naming it explicitly — turns the movie into a fun commentary on horror expectations, audience complicity in on-screen violence, and more, rather than just a middling late-revival slasher movie.
Critics in 2000 did not like this movie. It currently holds a 9% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, lower even than its predecessor’s paltry 20%. Many of them compared the film unfavorably to Scream 3 — no critical darling itself, although I like that movie too — which had just come out several months earlier.
“There’s nothing here that the Scream movies didn’t do first and better,” wrote Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel. “It delivers bald-faced variations on devices that were originally deployed, albeit with a redeeming glint of irony, in the Scream films and in Scary Movie,” said David Chute in the Los Angeles Times. Christy Lemire in the Associated Press thought this sequel “makes the original Urban Legend look like an Alfred Hitchcock movie by comparison.” Which is very true, but not entirely in quite the way I think she means it… because the entire project of Urban Legends: Final Cut is indeed to have Hitchcockian storytelling entered into the pantheon of urban legend. Have you heard the one about the girl who was stabbed in the shower?
First, though, before I get to that: having watched these movies back-to-back, as sequels go, it is kind of fun to see how Urban Legends: Final Cut re-uses some of the iconography of the first film. Usually, when you think of horror franchises, you think of killers coming back for a second go. Jigsaw’s puppet; Freddy’s gloves; Michael’s shock of hair and dark, staring eye-holes. Urban Legends: Final Cut, too, wants you to remember the killer in the first film. But, the fur coat was patently ridiculous as a signature look for a killer, and the film knows it, connecting the image with silly rubber masks of Frankenstein and the Wolf-Man stripping those horror icons of their ability to inspire dread as it undercuts its own franchise.
This is a different kind of killer, the film is saying. Instead, we soon learn, this killer wears a fencing mask. To be fair, it’s not scary or potentially-iconic, either, but it certainly fits the horror tradition of slasher masks that are unsettling in their impassivity… rather than a hooded coat that’s just particularly good at keeping the killer’s face in shadow.
Urban Legends: Final Cut is making no secret of its intention to pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic films (most significantly Vertigo, Strangers on a Train, and Psycho, among others). The main characters are film students, making films to compete for the prestigious “Hitchcock Award.” (Strangely, it doesn’t appear to be a horror-only award; people enter films of all genres.) However, even though the film explicitly shouts out Hitchcock, the vast majority of reviews of the film that I’ve read appear to have missed most of the Hitchcock homages littered throughout the text.
First, Vertigo. Urban Legends: Final Cut features a pretty blonde love-interest character who is the doppelganger of someone who is reported to have committed suicide early in the film — although here, the character is a man. During the early memorial scene, we see the character’s portrait surrounded by some of the most vibrant colors in the whole film — greens and reds, just like Kim Novak’s character is famously associated with in Hitchcock’s film. There are several identity-reversals and suspicions that the dead character may actually be alive, like Vertigo. And, crucially, there is a murder sequence that plays out in a bell-tower, just like the nested murder/suicides in Vertigo.
Next, Urban Legends: Final Cut includes a handful of homages to Strangers on a Train, which is one of my favorite Hitchcock movies. That film famously features an inciting murder that takes place at an amusement park, as does Final Cut. Ostensibly, Urban Legends is enacting the urban legend where a carnival’s “tunnel of terror” ride features actual corpses. In Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock builds suspense by taking the characters through the Tunnel of Love in separate boats, making us think that the killer is going to overpower the woman and strangle her; he doesn’t, and it’s not until he gets her alone on an island that she dies. Here, however, the murders do take place inside the thrill ride; the film is both upending our expectations of the Hitchcock homage, and having the killer carry out the urban legend murder being filmed in the movie-within-the-movie.
Earlier in the movie, the film-within-the-film is shooting a scene about the urban legend where everyone on a campus screams for a full minute at midnight to release stress, inadvertently drowning out the sounds of someone being murdered. At that time, while the film’s director is capturing the sound of people screaming, the killer bludgeons the film’s cinematographer to death with a camera lens. Strangers on a Train, too, covers up the sounds of Miriam’s murder by having it take place on a lover’s island, nearby listeners mistaking her gasps and groans for the happy shrieks and screams of a carnival .The Final Cut sequence ends with the corpse reflected in the shattered lens, echoing the image Miriam’s corpse being lowered to the ground by Bruno in Strangers.
Finally, there’s the Psycho shower scene. This is the most exciting part of the movie, I think, and it is somewhat of a shame that it comes so early on; nothing else in the film lives up to this point, as much fun as the other homages are. Here, in this two-minute sequence, Urban Legends: Final Cut picks up the foundational horror threads that Hitchcock began in the infamous Psycho shower sequence, traces them up through modern (90s) horror, and even anticipates what the next decade of horror will bring.
First, let’s re-watch the original shower scene. Note how it creates suspense because we see Mrs. Bates before Marion does. Recall audiences being scandalized by the presence of a flushing toilet, and pay attention to how it objectifies Janet Leigh’s body (or doesn’t). Note how a lot of the quick-cut camera movements are from the point of view of the killer, such that it almost seems like the camera is doing the slashing, and pay attention to the way the actual slicing-and-dicing is suggested rather than shown. Finally, note the end of the sequence, with its circles and its staring, unblinking eyes.
Now, take a look at the sequence as interpreted by Urban Legends: Final Cut. The urban legend they are re-enacting is the one where the woman holds her hand over the edge of her bed and feels a reassuring lick on her palm, so she thinks her dog is there; the next day, she finds her dog slaughtered in her bathroom and the words “Humans can lick too” written in blood on the mirror. However, that doesn’t really matter; what’s important is that, like the college-kids-screaming-for-stress-relief-cum-Strangers-on-a-Train sequence, and the I’m-not-actually-certain-what-urban-legend-it’s-meant-to-be-but-people-getting-murdered-in-a-bell-tower-a-la-Vertigo sequence, Final Cut is using the urban legend as a pretext for a Hitchcock homage as a way to suggest that the horror film genre serves the same function in culture.
As you’re watching, pay attention to how it creates suspense because we know the killer is in the bathroom before Sandra does. Notice how casually her friends objectify Sandra’s body, forty years after Psycho. Note how the entire filmed sequence is from the point of view of the camera-wielding killer, and listen for the sound effects as we see something whoosh past the projection, such that it almost sounds like the camera is doing the slashing, and pay attention to the way the actual slicing-and-dicing is suggested rather than shown. Finally, note the end of the sequence, with its emphasis on circles and its staring, unblinking eyes.
Comparing these two clips says a lot about where the horror genre saw itself in the year 2000, both its past and its future. The new version is frantically edited, but not really more-so than the original. We call for more blood. What was once shocking in 1960 (i.e., a toilet on screen) has become completely passé, to the point where we barely even notice it in the Final Cut version of the sequence. We require a lot more action, too — the victim here runs and flees the attacker, suggesting that we no longer accept Marion Crane standing there in shock while she is stabbed repeatedly. Whereas Hitchcock implicated his audience in the horror by having the shower scene in point-of-view, slashing at his victim with his camera, modern audiences need more; we want an audience-within-the-film, shouting “get her” and being unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, so that we too feel ashamed for enjoying the misogynistic violence on screen.
And, perhaps most interestingly, Final Cut seems to anticipate the later popularity of the found-footage subgenre. The Blair Witch Project, considered the first found-footage film, had come out only a year before Final Cut, likely just several months, if that, before Final Cut was in production. While it’s certainly possible that Final Cut’s found-footage sequences — this, and the later revelation that the cinematographer’s murder was also captured on security cam footage — were influenced by Blair Witch, it’s intriguing that the format is included in a sequence that’s in many ways about the history of horror. Like many later found-footage films, this film is suggesting that in some ways, all horror film is snuff film; this movie recognizes that found-footage is a new way of implicating ever-savvier audiences demanding ever-more-realistic on-screen violence.
In its use of urban legends as inspiration for Hitchcock homages, Urban Legends: Final Cut is a fitting capstone for the meta-slasher revival of the late 90s and early 00s. While it certainly may be riding a popularity wave of films that are similar, Final Cut has something to say about horror film as folklore, and it doesn’t deserve its reputation as a cheap imitation of its immediate predecessors. It’s proud to be a remixed version of horror history, dammit! To paraphrase James Twitchell and Carol Clover (as I keep doing this month), all horror films are cheap imitations of their predecessors. That’s exactly what makes the genre so much fun.
But where can I watch it? Urban Legends: Final Cut is streaming on Amazon, via a fullscreen subscription.
