When I’ve spent five hours browsing Netflix trying figure out what the hell I’m in the mood to watch, my final “throw in the towel” choice will usually be a documentary. Crime. Creepy stuff. Profiles of murderers. Nostalgic pop culture junk. My standards are low. I don’t read reviews first. It can be trashy and sensationalist. That’s perfectly fine. It just can’t be boring or some kind of letdown from the capsule description.
So, I guess it’s not a huge compliment to say that I enjoyed this movie that speculates about the real life horror stories behind well-known urban legends. Director Joshua Zeman is half-journalist, half-exploitation maestro. He’s serious about the research. He’s on camera a lot, investigating, questioning, flipping through small town microfiche newspaper archives, tossing theories back and forth with his partner. He seems intense. He doesn’t have TV charisma. He’s more a rugged filmmaker-type. Zeman seems to want to tell the truth.
But he also wants to sell a movie so he lays on the spooky-ooky music that rolls throughout like fog in a cemetery. Then when he visits the real-life sites of past murders, out in the deep, dark woods of flyover country, he always does it in the dead of night for maximum chills.
Whatever his intention, Zeman got me stop and gawk.
The urban legends covered here:
1) The old saw about the young couple parked on lover’s lane getting hot and heavy in the front seat while stalked by a mad murderer. Zeman traces this back to the real-life series of such killings back in the 1940s in Texas (the basis for the film The Town That Dreaded Sundown).
2) The big hubub about kids getting poison and razorblades in their Halloween candy. This was a HUGE scare back in the 80s. I didn’t even get to trick-or-treat for a few years back then because of it (the way I remember it, my mother just bought my sister and I a bunch of candy on Halloween and that was our big Monster Mash). Meanwhile, there never was any epidemic whatsoever of kids dying from tainted Halloween candy. It all comes from ONE documented case in 1974 in Houston, TX (Texas again, yeesh) that I won’t spoil in case you don’t know about it, but Zeman runs through the story here, complete with interviews with the original cops on the case and the prosecuting attorney.
3) The babysitter in peril story. It’s been the subject of 900 horror movies, but there’s only one known case in the annals of American crime of a babysitter slaying–and you have to go back to an unsolved murder in 1950s rural Missouri to find it.
4) The scary clowns trope. Everybody knows about John Wayne Gacy’s exploits back in the 70s, but apparently Chicago (Gacy’s town) continues to have a problem with creepy clowns in vans stalking children. Who knew?
Zeman previously co-directed the disappointing Cropsey. This is better, maybe because instead of grasping at straws in one sensational case, here he takes quick, economical shots (about twenty minutes each) at four of them.
Even the best carnival barker can only shout for so long about the bearded lady. He’s got to move on to the Siamese twins eventually to keep our interest.