When Urban Legends Go Wrong

[naomi_jay]

 If you know anything at all about urban legends, you probably know this one, the classic "Hook on the Hand" tale of young lovers who narrowly escape death at the hands of an escaped maniac. It's fairly standard stuff.

I was going to go all academic on your asses and write a massive essay comparing urban legends to fairy tales in terms of moral messages encoded in apparently fantastical stories, but I got caught up watching Hollyoaks last night (ZOMG, the incest!) so instead I'm going to explain why this particular urban legend is utter tripe. Hey, it's almost Halloween! You can do this at Halloween.

Lets take the basic scary elements of the story: teenagers alone in the dark engaging in illicit sexual behaviour (probably). Okay, I can roll with that. That's the template of slasher flicks the world over. So, next: teenagers hear warning on the radio that a lunatic/mass murderer/serial killer has escaped from a nearby mental home and can be indentified by a hook on his hand.

Now, having worked for the police for a while, I can say in complete confidence that no convicted lunatic/mass murderer/serial killer would be allowed to keep his hook. It would be taken away from him to prevent him using it against himself or others. And as we can assume that the hook is his primary murder weapon, it would be evidence and therefore confiscated from him. I doubt they'd give it back afterwards.

Next: our hooked psycho uses the hook to open the car door, which is why the teens then find the hook later when they've sped away to safety. So, let me ask you this: if you had one fully functioning, normal hand and one hook instead of a hand, which would you use to open a car door with? Keeping in mind that you're probably going to want the hook free for disembowelling?

Yeah, thought so.

In a sense, these details are superfluous to the point of the story, which is don't have sex in the back of your car before you're married (and possibly even then), but it's interesting how these cliche and frankly ridiculous story elements have embedded themselves into our culture. I read somewhere that urban legends are a form of meme, passing down cultural information in an easily absorbed form, which would tie in nicely with my intellectual ramblings about urban legends being a modern form of fairy tale... But I'll save that for later...

Comments

[chaostheory.livejournal.com]

Meaow!

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Woof?

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Amusingly, both Candyman and Urban Legend (the first one, at least) address these things, as 90s cheese was self-aware. I'm carefully choosing to ignore the whole Scream franchise as that was more based on slasher movie cliché. Annnd then there's that episode of Millennium ("The Pest House" - season 3) which dealt with those sorts of things and the theory behind that one was, "everything old is new again," to keep the story -- and thus the evil, I guess -- alive for a whole new generation. I loved that episode not really for that premise, but more about the whole "im suckin teh evol outta ur braynz" thing as a modern-day form of sin eating that backfired horribly.

But I was having a similar thought not that long ago that urban legends are the new fairytales, and Snopes has become my new playground. I think because of the internet, these things get generated and passed on a lot faster -- a really good example is if you remember those two kids in Manchester (?) that killed a toddler? There was a rumour that they'd be released from prison and sent to Australia -- and family groups and politicians kicked up a fuss about this -- and I found out about a month or so later that a similar rumour went around the US to the point were email petitions were up on the 'net.

I'm kinda at the point where I'm seeing what I can yoink from these new stories to incorporate in some Grande Guignol type play/performance for a set of my characters. The gorier, the better.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

I love Snopes. I'm amazed at how many legends sprang up in the wake of 9/11 - and how many were variations on older legends, like Middle Eastern men warning people who'd helped them out in some way not to be in the Twin Towers after a certain date. A few years earlier the version had a Middle Eastern man warning people off drinking coke after a certain date.

This is a pretty good site too - http://www.project2067.com/

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Oooh! *Bookenmarken!*

I know I have a book somewhere called "Strangely Enough" with 101 short stories of folk-tales from various parts of the US and Europe, like the soldier who made a pact with the devil to get his boots filled with gold coins on halloween, only the soldier got greedy and put a hole in one boot so that it could never get filled up. The Devil found out and cracked a tantrum, and the guy's wealth dried up virtually overnight and he died miserably. Or there's one about clay balls that a tourist found while on holiday and threw them into the ocean for fun, and later found out that this is how pirates used to store their gems for a later date. And the classic, "guy picks up girl hitchhiker only later finds out she's dead."

It's a handy little tome.

All that said, I am tempted to eat pop rocks and drink soda at the same time to see if my head explodes.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

I've heard one about a jazz musician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame. I think he became a heroin addict, like all good musicians do.

I love stuff like this! Folklore rocks. Let me know how the pop rocks/soda thing works out...