For their gripping documentary about the persistence of urban legends in the adult mind, co-directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio returned to the place of their childhood and its darkest fears: Staten Island. Standing in a strip of deep forest that still runs through the middle of the rapidly developed island are ruins that speak to the island's not-so-distant past as New York's dumping ground for the unwanted. For decades, the island, the smallest of the region's five boroughs, was home not just to the massive Fresh Kills garbage dump (visible from space), but also tuberculosis sufferers and mental patients. The sprawling complexes like the Willowbrook Mental Institution now darkly loom, deserted and graffiti-covered, as reminders of past sins -- Willowbrook was closed after official investigations and muckraking reporting by a young firebrand named Geraldo Rivera uncovered a shocking level of abuse - and also dream factories for the production of urban legends.
The legend at the center of Cropsey was a favorite of Staten Island children, and in fact was told at campgrounds up and down the Hudson Valley. Whether he wielded a hook, knife, or ax, Cropsey was a madman who may have once lived or worked at Willowbrook or a place like it and was out to exact revenge on kids who wandered into parks of the dark woods where they shouldn't.
This idea of the sins of the past getting revisited upon the children of the present isn't just the stuff of campfire stories. After setting up the ghostly outlines of the endlessly mutable Cropsey legend (complete with smartly affixed maps and aerial photography), Zeman and Brancaccio dive into the case of Andre Rand, a drifter who was believed to be behind a number of child disappearances (several of them developmentally challenged) on the island during the 1980s. A starkly glaring man who lived in makeshift campgrounds near Willowbrook, where he once worked, he was first seen by many being led into a police car, head hanging with drool coming from his lip. Rand seemed made to order for the case of the missing children. Despite a lack of strong evidence, he was convicted in 1988 of abducting Jennifer Schweiger, a twelve-year-old with Down Syndrome, and was later charged with another kidnapping.
What made Rand so perfect as a suspect, the filmmakers propose in a sometimes heavy-handed manner, was the way his queasy behavior and appearance filled the gap of mystery left by these disappearances and helped placate a lynch-mob-ready public. Interviews (both new and archival) with witnesses and authorities involved in the cases show a number of people honestly trying to come to grips with tragedy.
But the film also finds a disturbingly large group willing to believe and pass on wildly unsubstantiated theories about satanic cults in the tunnel system under Willowbrook, where homeless people did in fact live, as the filmmakers discover when they go on their own Blair Witch-style ghost hunt. Rand's innocence or guilt is ultimately impossible to determine, but what the film proves without a doubt is that a bogeyman needed to be found, and where facts are lacking, fantasy and nightmares fill in quite nicely.
