The blood-thirsty hitchhiker, the escaped psycho with a hook for a hand, the babysitter and the call that is somehow unequivocally coming from inside the house; we all known them. The modern day fables that have shaped our fears and behaviours (and as a result, horror cinema) arguably more than any others. Urban legends that all seem to have sprung out of the American post-war hangover of the 1950s and ’60s, as inequality took seed and the dark side of the new white-picket-fence suburbia slowly set in off-screen. Ed Gein and Ted Bundy and the Moors Murders filled the news. Doubts about our fellow man, and about what they’re capable of. About how we very much aren’t “all in this together”; that the days of blindly trusting one another are all but over. That people, strangers in particular, are more likely to be dangerous than helpful.
And naturally, those cautionary tales bled into culture and filmmaking. Psycho and Peeping Tom gave way to The Collector and Blood Feast and Black Christmas and Halloween; stories of terrifying, human murderers. Mentally unhinged men, preying on ordinary people (largely women) just like you or me. Soon Cape Fear and Repulsion and Straw Dogs and Death Wish saw the home invasion go mainstream; even your house, your safe space, was no longer off limits. Suddenly those campfire stories felt real enough to go from deliberately frightening fantasies, to lessons we should all heed. And the modern horror movie took flight, swapping out the plain spectacle of fantastical monsters and far-off lands, for the creeping dread hiding in the bushes and closets and behaviours of our own everyday lives.
Many films have riffed on these fables, but only a small handful have fully captured their spirit enough to have essentially become synonymous with the legends themselves.
Case in point, Robert Harmon’s 1986 chiller The Hitcher is the quintessential killer hitchhiker movie. A film that’s so in-tune with the simplicity of the story and the aimlessness of its antagonist – an almost supernatural being who only ever emerges from the shadows to deliver pain and suffering and nothing else, a lesson in spectral form – that it fully achieves exactly what the original urban legend intended. Not only an immediate distrust of hitchhikers (the ultimate stranger; a drifter on the street with no home, no car and no real direction) but a warning against the very basics of human kindness.
Yes, it’s raining. Yes, you’re in the middle of nowhere. Yes that man’s in a vulnerable position and needs your help. But you have absolutely no idea what he is capable of. And as The Hitcher’s hero Jim Halsey soon finds, that one simple act of kindness can ultimately unravel and destroy everything you are, and everything you want to be, in just one (very bloody) day.
But even before Harmon’s harbinger of human nastiness, there was a slew of urban legend-based horror, the most impactful often coming from the infamous tale of “the babysitter and the man upstairs”. A classic story with no real clear origin (it’s thought to be related to the collective fear following the murder of teenager Janett Christman, a 14 year old who was brutally killed while babysitting) it very quickly became the backbone of the slasher genre. Namely by inspiring the 1971 short Foster’s Release (made by John Carpenter’s film-school pals Terence H. Winkless and Dan O’Bannon) which would go on to inform both Black Christmas, and Carpenter’s own Halloween.
And while both certainly used elements of the legend – a terrifying male voice who won’t stop calling, a babysitter facing off with a knife-wielding killer – it wasn’t until Fred Walton’s 1979 shocker When A Stranger Calls that the tale was fully cemented into the public conscious. The Carol Kane-starring home invasion chiller takes down the story almost verbatim in its first act (and from Walton’s own earlier short The Sitter), in what remains one of the most riveting and deeply uncomfortable sequences in a domestic horror film. Even considering its ropey remake and much-parodied legacy, Walton’s execution still stings, and much like Harmon would a decade later with The Hitcher, he certainly doesn’t pull any punches, using the emptiness violence leaves behind over the spectacle of its gore, to make a truly haunting piece of cinema.
The defenceless babysitter would soon get teeth, spinning out from Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode and Kane’s much more considered Jill Johnson into what we know now as the final girl. Babysitters would become camp counsellors or just everyday teens as the ’80s slasher boom took hold, and a great deal of the women involved would heed the lessons of those that came before them, often tooling-up and facing the killer head on without the help of the state or law enforcement.
But eventually by the mid-to-late ’90s, snarky cartoon comedies like The Simpsons and South Park were becoming the zeitgeist. Lessons were being learned in a different way, and much of culture was shifting towards self-awareness, so horror too had to change. Halloween was a franchise that was suddenly six sequels deep. Its less exciting but more consistent younger brother Friday the 13th had just put out movie number nine. What had begun as a cautionary fable to teens all over the world was now well and truly stale; the initial terror (and thus, the lesson itself) wearing off and leaving behind nothing but schlocky slasher movies and violent spectacle where once stood the substance of real, honest fear. Horror filmmakers needed a new way of reinvigorating and evolving the campfire story.
Enter Kevin Williamson, a soap actor turned screenwriter who had just stumbled on the solution. Running off of Wes Craven’s surprise meta take on Freddy Krueger in 1994 Elm Street sequel New Nightmare, Williamson foresaw a world in which horror could be cognisant and able to riff on its own structures and expectations, but still be just as rooted in terror and impact as it had been back in the 70s. His answer was two scripts, both rooted in urban legends, the first of which quickly became a cultural sensation in 1996.
Scream wound up being directed by who else but Craven himself, and opens on another riff on the babysitter dynamic. Drew Barrymore’s Casey is a young woman home alone, being hounded by a threatening male voice on the phone; but what happened next completely shifted the genre. Unlike Jill Johnson or the ladies of Black Christmas, Casey calls the creepy voice’s bluff, only to find he’s not afraid to make good on his promise of gutting her like a fish. The film’s star may know the rules and how these urban legends go, but it won’t save her. And she’s not just picked off like another loose member of a doomed ensemble either; Craven draws her murder out in agonising fashion, before Williamson’s script wheels out her parents to really hit home the depravity.
Even just from that opening scene alone, Williamson’s manifesto was clear – these stories are still important, and in a rapidly changing world of cheap masks, mobile phones and voice changing technology, their warnings have never been more pertinent. What’s more, the very fact that we know how these fables play out now only puts us more in danger, lulling us into a false sense of security. The new generation of killers aren’t mentally deranged lake dwellers, they’re among us. And they’re just as savvy as we are. Much like Jamie Kennedy’s Randy in Scream, we think we know what’s going on, only to sleepwalk straight into the killer’s path.
And if Scream’s approach to the babysitter legend proved a clever and subtle shot in the arm for the genre, Williamson’s immediate follow-up I Know What You Did Last Summer would stand to be very much the opposite. Adapting the much less subtle “Hookman” fable, it set its sights on being a loud, campy blast of old-school silliness that would reinforce Scream’s messaging to an even broader audience.
Helmed by first-time feature director Jim Gillespie, IKWYDLS is almost soap-opera-like in its execution. Four close-knit teens on the cusp of leaving their small picturesque fishing town, and the drunk-driving accident that ruins their lives; it could be an after-school special if it wasn’t immediately followed by 90 minutes of mass murder. Williamson’s trademark self-aware scripting is much more deliberately on-the-nose. The campfire story that sets the expectation for the hook-handed killer to strike takes place around a literal campfire. Each character takes it in turns to show just how well versed they are in horror lore by adding their own spin on the tale as its told. And the killer himself (a fisherman) totally ignores any sense of reason, ditching his gutting knives and opting to swing around an ice hook, seemingly for no other reason than that it’s in the original urban legend.
Still, much like in Scream, self-awareness cannot save the townsfolk. Teen after teen is promptly bumped off (although in far less bloody fashion) and Williamson’s message remains clear – it doesn’t matter how hokey these campfire stories seem, killers live among us. Stranger danger is real.
A small bubble of similar post-Scream slashers would follow, each taking the instant classic’s lead by zeroing in on a different element of the meta-narrative around horror folklore. Disturbing Behaviour and Cherry Falls focussed on teen promiscuity; Urban Legend went hard on the mythos behind the storytelling itself and the way fables are passed down; its sequel Final Cut challenged cinema’s role too (something Scream would also reckon with in its threequel). Meanwhile a Williamson-less IKWYDLS sequel, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer would double down on the first film’s kitschy appeal, casting camp queen and recent Cinderella Brandy, alongside more comedic actors like Jack Black and Jeffrey Combs.
Eventually, the fourth-wall-breaking filmmaking of Scream moved on to broader heights (namely superhero blockbusters), and horror fans tired of it quickly. Scary Movie and similar parodies said the quiet part out loud one too many times, before J-Horror and New French Extremist imports – paired with a certain amount of post-9/11 melancholy – brought genre audiences back down to earth, with far less eccentric franchises. Saw, Hostel and their progressively more disgusting sequels took seed, but a decade or so later, it was still Williamson’s tonal spin on the urban legend that stood the test of time.
In the 2020s, horror movies are arguably the safest bet in cinema, regularly sitting atop the box office with a far bigger and less specialised audience than previously, thanks to the legacy of funner, more approachably silly releases like IKWYDLS. Not to mention the vast spread of horror on TV, with runaway hits like American Horror Story and Scream Queens using the same kitschy energy. Even shows aimed at younger viewers like Pretty Little Liars and Riverdale lean on IKWYDLS’s corny brand of horror in their storytelling, eventually resulting in a direct IKWYDLS remake that very much ripped off a lot of those teen-focussed shows in return.
The legacy of urban legends in horror is a long and storied one, having moved from occupying a space of genuine terror in society – real fears, created by generational change – to becoming what is noticeably far lighter entertainment. This isn’t to say that they’ve lost their effect, however. If anything, quite the opposite; the cautions and lessons at the heart of such folklore are now more soaked into our culture than ever before.
Teenagers don’t need to be lectured on stranger danger anymore, it’s simply a part of their socialisation from an early age. And we have horror movies to thank.
The Hitcher (1986), When A Stranger Calls (1979) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) all screened as part of Forbidden Worlds Film Festival’s The Big Scream 2024.
