Cropsey - dir. by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman (2009)

Cropsey was a maniac, an escaped patient of a mental institution, a bogeyman who scared children sitting around campfires up and down the Hudson Valley of New York state. Like all folklore, no matter how fantastic, the Cropsey legend arises from real fear and guilt, from a dark element of the culture that is so pervasive it shows up in the subconscious of the most innocent and uneducated members of society. The American mental health system throughout the first three quarters of the 20th century was a disgraceful network of overcrowded, understaffed institutions with some of the largest, most disfunctional hospitals located on Staten Island and Long Island. Enter Geraldo Rivera and his crusade to make a change (and get famous).

In their 2009 documentary film Cropsey Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman explore the real life Cropsey tale of a Staten Island derelict, Andre Rand, accused of kidnapping and murdering at least five children on the island in the 70s and 80s. Most famously Rand was convicted of the murder of Jennifer Schweiger, a 13-year-old with Down syndrome. The directors manage to weave an intricate narrative out of a very cloudy, sensitive story, using newsreel footage, interviews with Staten Islanders involved with the case, and an eerie NYPD missing persons detective who seems to think the serial disappearances are all the work of Satanists.

It’s hard to create horror out of real life, especially in the age of hyper-saturated media, but the lore of Staten Island and the testimonies of the families and community members affected by these crimes helps to deepen the mystery surrounding Rand’s guilt or innocence, while at the same time revealing a lynch mob mentality in a society unwilling to admit its own culpability in creating a monster. In the end, the question is not whether Rand murdered these children because he felt they were better off dead than at the disposal of a cruel and destructive mental health system, or if a group of Satanists sacrificed them for some greater glory. The question is how and why we created these guilty monsters and scapegoats. How can we dump our trash and our human refuse on the Staten Islands of the world and still be surprised when out of the filth arise such demons?

Check out the film's website here.

Here's some more info about the Cropsey legend.

We All Scream For Ice Cream - Dir. by Tom Holland (2007)

The tropes of We All Scream For Ice Cream, Tom Holland’s installment in the Masters of Horror series, are well-worn. We’ve got the communal guilt and childhood temptation, not to mention the creepy clown, of Stephen King’s It and the unwieldy power of children, straight out of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos, the novel Wolf Rilla used as the basis for his brilliant 1960 film, Village of the Damned. But here Holland, director of Fright Night and Child’s Play imbues his subject with enough creepy camp and nostalgia to turn a fresh twist on that old adage that you can’t go home again.

Adapted from John Ferris’s short story, We All Scream For Ice Cream follows the mysterious disappearances of a group of middle aged men, once known as the West End Bunch, who are now paying for a horrible crime they committed when they were very young. Buster, a dim-witted clown, who sells Cheery Time ice cream to the town’s children, has returned from the dead to exact vengeance on the West End Bunch, and he’s using Cheery Time ice cream and the appetites of children to do it.

Honestly, Holland’s job making Buster into a terrifying lure of temptation for the West End Bunch’s children is no accomplishment. Clown’s are scary, plain and simple, but the delight that modest treats like ice cream brought to an American suburban childhood through the second half of the 20th century, is easily manipulated and combined with a child’s resentment for his or her parents into a guilt-ridden paranoid trip through the past.

The real terror comes not from the children who wield the power to destroy their parents, but the ghost of Buster, who represents the regret we all feel for our own childhood indiscretions. The death Buster brings is almost a sweet release for Big Joe, who as a kid didn’t even directly participate in the crime against Buster, but who still feels wracked with guilt. Do we submit to our painful memories like Big Joe, or fight back?

Since Tom Holland’s at the helm here, all this deep stuff is delivered with a spoonful of schlock and kitsch, including a righteously redneck old bully flexing his muscles in a barrel full of suds, and plenty of lukewarm sexual tensions between the protagonist and his wife. Still, I’d recommend this for fans of Tales From the Crypt, both the HBO series and the old EC comics, for its great ironic imagery and fun morbid twists.

William Forsythe delivers an awkward but arresting performance as Buster, a mentally retarded clown, who has an endearing and annoying shtick, overshadowing most of the other bland actors in this low budget production. But when the lives of your characters are so expendable, in such a short period of time, you don’t want to make your audience fall in the love with them. So, Buster’s death is, rightly, the only one here that makes an impact, the rest just melt into oblivion and out of our minds.

Check out this interview with director Tom Holland.