URBAN LEGEND (1998)— The Ostension is Coming from Inside the House.

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

On this week's annotated deep dive, The Cultists present 'Urban Legend' (1998). A classic tale of a disgruntled heartbroken serial killer who seeks vengeance by re-enacting even more classic tales of contemporary lore, UL is the kind of film that has a surprising amount of depth lurking beneath its colorful, campy surface. Taking inspiration from the foundational urban legend scholarship of Jan Harold Brunvard and stuffing references to a wide range of contemporary tale cycles into every turn, UL’s most lasting, yet oft forgotten, legacy is that it helped bring the term “Urban Legend” out of the pages of Brunvard’s collegiate books and into the mass culture of a vernacular teenage audience. That’s right, this is the kind of film that academics (re: folklorists) love, even if no one else will admit that they do too. (We will though).

Deep Dives include: the film’s production history; the subtle but stunning lighting and camerawork; the folklore sources and evolved cultural meanings of the multitude of the film’s referenced urban legend cycles (including the static enduring threats that lurk around and under your car, the ever-shifting concern of birth control pill swapping, the Victorian marriage rituals of Bloody Mary, and the 70s flash fear of the danger of BubbleYum and Pop Rocks, etc.); the foundational folklore scholarship of Brunvard, Dundes, and Degh; why if you decide to kill a bunch of people by re-enacting urban legends it’s called “ostension” ; and how even after all that, the strangest thing of all is that this film’s top billed cast member is pretty sure he was never in it.

Episode Safeword: "veracity"