URBAN LEGEND (1998) seeks originality in the familiar. It fails, but still. It tries.

#31DaysOfHorror: October 10

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

The students at Pendleton University enjoy telling each other tall tales about a massacre that took place on campus 25 years ago. It’s all fun and games, until they start dying…

Before long, they realize they’re being killed by someone who is acting out urban legends. Most of the time. Not always. But we’ll overlook that.

My Review

In my review of Better Watch Out, I mentioned Carol Clover and James Twitchell’s work on horror film as folktale. The basic idea goes that horror film functions as a reflection of culture, serving up an endlessly-remixed and refashioned, yet limited number of narratives that include common elements, images, motifs. Horror stories circulate as folklore because they often transmit morals; for example, everyone knows that you shouldn’t have extramarital sex if you find yourself in a slasher movie, because you’ll be killed.

Urban Legend, a late-90s slasher, is based on this very idea — that sometimes the things that scare us are the familiar stories, things we’ve already heard that tap into primal societal fears. In fact, the main characters in Urban Legend are taking a university class based on folktales and urban legends, taught by Professor Wexler — played by Robert Englund, best-known as Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. It’s inspired casting; who better to set the tone of a film about horror storytelling as society’s subconscious than a man who was a monster who preyed on dreams?

“Last week we discussed folklore as a gauge for the values of the society that created them. Today, we get more specific,” he tells his class, describing the same urban legend that I wrote about in the Better Watch Out review linked above, with the babysitter who gets phone calls that are coming from inside the house. “The babysitter and the man upstairs is what we call an urban legend: contemporary folklore passed on as a true story. Now, there are variations of this one going back to the 1960s. All of them containing the same cultural admonition: young women, mind your children or harm will come your way.”

Urban Legend seeks to create an original slasher film by mashing up a number of urban legends we’ve all heard before, including the one about the woman who doesn’t realize there’s someone hiding in the backseat of her car, and the one about the girl and the guy who go parking until the guy leaves her alone and then the girl hears knocking on the roof of the car and it’s the guy because he’s been hung from the tree above.

It’s an interesting strategy, and one that fits in with the meta-slasher wave at the tail end of the 00s. Films like Scream and Wes Craven’s New Nightmare played on the idea of killers resurrecting and recreating familiar genre scenes and beats with savvier victims, so Urban Legend tries to create a new sort of slasher where the victims already know how the killings will play out, and are racing to figure out the story the killer is re-enacting before they succeed.

The trouble is… it doesn’t do that particularly well. After a solid setup where viewers easily recognize the backseat killer and the boyfriend being hung above the parked car, the main character decides to research other urban legends so she can be prepared. The camera gives us a close-up of what she’s reading:

Ah, yes. The story where a girl goes home and doesn’t realize her roommate is being murdered in the darkness, so she goes right to bed, not knowing that the killer is right there in the room with her. The next morning, she wakes up to find her roommate dead and sees that the killer has written on the wall in blood, “AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU DIDN’T TURN ON THE LIGHT?”

While the main character is researching urban legends, the film cuts back and forth with her roommate, who’s soliciting an online hookup. (There’s a moral: Don’t find sex online!) Gee, we think! The main character is about to go back to her room and find the roommate being murdered, but this time, she’ll be prepared and she will turn on the light, because she knows the urban legend!

Nope. She goes home, hears groaning and screaming, assumes her roommate is having sex, consciously chooses not to turn on the light, and goes to sleep… and wakes up the next morning to find her roommate dead and sees that the killer has written on the wall in blood, “AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU DIDN’T TURN ON THE LIGHT?”

The whole point of these meta slashers is that the victims are supposed to be smarter now. Especially in this film, where the characters are actively studying urban legends and researching all of the different stories, it’s simply unforgivable to refuse to let your characters ever get one step ahead of the killer.

After this point, the premise kind of falls apart. Someone is run over by his own car after falling onto parking spikes… but I don’t remember ever hearing that one at a sleepover. Someone else is drowned in the toilet during his house party… nope, not a story I’ve ever been told around a campfire. And someone is decapitated while on the radio doing a call-in sex advice talk show…? Not super-familiar there, either...

And therein lies the problem with Urban Legend. Most iconic slashers have a modus operandi; it’s part of the fun. When you see those boots crunching through the leaves and see the swinging machete and the hockey mask, you know Jason’s on the prowl. When that metal-claw glove bursts through the wall (or your chest), you know Freddy’s coming for you. Here, though? The killer wears a generic coat with a fur hood… which is used as a misdirection what feels like half a dozen times, as it seems like everyone has the same coat. And, the method of murder is different each and every time. There’s no sense of rhythm, no buildup or momentum; instead, the murders seem to happen randomly, with no sense of purpose or intention behind them.

The one draw for the film is that it’s fun to see which actors and actresses became bigger stars after its release, and which ones faded away. Jared Leto is easily the best-known of the film’s actors today; two years after this movie, he starred in Requiem for a Dream (and then it was all downhill from there). Joshua Jackson, who is killed early-on, became a teen heartthrob in Dawson’s Creek the year this movie came out, and has worked steadily ever since. Alicia Witt — the main character in the film — hasn’t done much in the way of movies in the last few years, although she’s done pretty well in television.

At the end of Urban Legend, the two surviving characters remark on the fact that, now that their ordeal is over, the story of the serial killer who based their murders on urban legends would itself become an urban legend. The film did indeed spawn two sequels, Urban Legends: Final Cut and Urban Legends: Bloody Mary. I’ve only ever seen the original film before this year, but every time I do #31DaysOfHorror, I like to explore franchises I don’t know so well, so perhaps I will continue on and see how the Urban Legend evolves with each telling…

But where can I watch it? Urban Legend is available on Amazon, with a fullscreen subscription.