CROPSEY (2010) - Documentary about Staten Island, campfire tales, child abductions/murders, poorly run state mental facilities in the 1970s and how we as a culture tend to spin stories from varied details, sometimes just to cover terrible but unappealing truths. Interesting for fans of horror films, as will become apparent.
The starting point is twofold. The traditional widespread urban legend/campfire folklore tale of the "mad killer" tends to have a particular name attached to it in the Hudson Valley - "Cropsey" (yes, just like from the horror movie THE BURNING). The documenatry makers were told this traditional story like most kids who went to summer camp, but they went to camp on Staten Island, and so "Cropsey" was said to haunt the huge, abandoned state mental hospital adjacent to the summer camp.
And that's where the second strand of the documentary comes in. A young reporter, Geraldo Rivera, made a name for himself in 1974 exposing the state-run, poorly funded Willowbrook Asylum as one of the last notorious "snake pits" - (barely) surviving videotape footage of the television expose shows naked, retarded children living in their own filth, crammed into vast halls unattended and being fed like animals. 10 years later (ahhhh, lazy, unregulated local government), Willowbrook was shut down and fell into ruin. And stories developed that many of the mentally ill, turned out onto the streets with no support structure (ahhhh, Reaganomics) returned to the grounds of Willowbrook, living in the underground tunnel systems. And then a developmentally disabled little girl disappeared. And then her body was found buried on the grounds of Willowbrook and a (seemingly) crazed itinerant worker, Andre Rand - who HAD been living on the grounds since he worked at Willowbrook as a physical therapist - was arrested and jailed for the murder on less than solid evidence (nice to see local NYC TV news reporters I grew up with, like Sue Simmons and Jack Cafferty, in poorly degraded videotape news clips). And then the public and the police began to realize that quite a number of kids had been disappearing from Staten Island towns all through the 70s and 80s...
This was an interesting documentary, a bit different than the usual true-crime doc as it also explores the stories (plausible, bizarre, paranoid) that build up around unresolved events that expose things we'd rather not think about as a society. The backbone of CROPSEY forms as, in 2008, Andre Rand comes up for parole, and an attempt is made to keep him in jail by trying him for some of those other disappearances on circumstantial evidence. But is/was Rand innocent, just an easy scapegoat as one of his few acquaintinces contests? Or was he involved in something more complex? The filmmakers gather increasingly bizarre local tales, from both credible cops and dubious religious nuts, of Rand leading an undeground society of mentally ill homeless people that haunt the tunnels, of Rand's own mental problems and troubled family past, and (as may be expected during the "satanic panic" of the 1980s - ahhhh, Evangelical zeal) of the inevitable expected ties to supposed child-killing Satanic cults employing Rand as a procurer (Maury Terry's half-credible/half-credulous research from his Son of Sam book THE ULTIMATE EVIL is lightly touched on). They talk to the locals who organized searches for the girl back in the 80s and then visit the abandoned asylum and the tunnels themselves. And then Rand finally writes back to the filmmakers from jail and agrees to an interview.
CROPSEY stays interesting all the way to through to the almost inevitable end and, like the culture of storytelling and dark suburban secrets it exposes, leaves us with more questions than answers. Compelling stuff.
The trailer is HERE:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJKPvaNEVjs
