The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Urban Legends are stories that have become pieces of modern folklore. That is to say, they are stories that are believed to be true by many who recount them but where the origins of the story remain unclear and the actual factual content either dubious or unsupported.
Some genre works incorporate existing urban legends such as stories about alligators flushed down the sewers; stories of Bigfoot and the chupacabra; stories of UFOs and the Men in Black; many of the entries that go into Films That Make Dubious Claims to Be Based on True Stories; while the popularly believed (but untrue) claim that we only use 10% of our brain has been incorporated into some SF stories.
In genre material, there was a horror series set around urban legends beginning with Urban Legend (1998). Other series can also be counted, particularly those featuring Boogeymen and quasi-supernatural figures of urban legend such as Slender Man, La Llorona or the Slit-Mouthed Woman or fictional ones such as Candyman.
Amid the spate of post-Jaws Animals Amok films, this, which comes armed with a John Sayles script and plays on the urban legend of baby alligators flushed into the sewers, was a rather enjoyable effort that plants tongue in cheek
Charles B. Pierce, a director who gained a cult with his films for 1970s drive-in audiences, makes a sequel to his earlier pseudo-documentary The Legend of Boggy Creek about the hunt for a Bigfoot creature
Film based on an urban legend film about a boogeyman that kills everybody that speaks its name. Director Stacy Title creates one or two haunting and unusual scenes but in every other aspect this emerges as exceedingly generic
J-horror film based on the Japanese urban legend of a boogeywoman with a face slit from ear to ear who appears to kill people
An extension of The Conjuring universe with a film based on the Mexican legend of the crying woman La Llorona. This killed by the director’s constant straining for effect
A Found Footage film with a camera crew searching Halloween attractions for the most extreme haunt only to find something else. The film has a certain effect where we are not entirely sure what is real
Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury made the brutally extreme Inside. Here they return with what feels like an unofficial copy of Candyman about a vengeful boogeywoman
Slender Man is the fascinating idea of an internet meme that has crossed over to become an urban legend in the real world; this is the film version. This held the potential to be something very uncanny but chooses to play everything incredibly safe and middle-of-the-road
A film based on the so-called Smiley Face Killings, a series of theorised true-life serial killings. With a script by Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame
Indie film that seems a mix of A Field in England and The Picnic at Hanging Rock. The first half contains some very realistic scenes of people getting wasted on drugs but the second as characters set out along a path in the woods that leads to Hell proves frustratingly elusive
Modest and well-made low-budget anthology of Christmas horror tales from three Canadian filmmakers
Following the success of Scream, this was an attempt to make an upmarket slasher film based around the motif of urban legends in the same way that Scream used 1980s slasher films. It is a stretch to make urban legends fit in some cases but director Jamie Blanks delivers reasonable tension
The third of the Urban Legend films, unconnected to any of the previous two. This lamely tries to stretch the thin premise out to a story of high school supernatural vengeance
Sequel fairly much in name only to Urban Legend and barely at all about urban legends, this has the amusing idea of taking place at a film school and features a number of sly asides. This alas befalls routine direction
The popular V/H/S series, an anthology of Found Footage horror tales, is revived for a fourth entry
A horror anthology that ostensibly tells a series of children’s tales but heads for an admirable grotesquerie