Introduction

For the past ten years or so, I have focused much of my research on the relationship between urban legends and popular cinema. Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends is a collection of some previously published articles I have written on this subject. One of my reasons for wanting to republish these essays is that they originally appeared in some obscure publications and remain known to only a select few. With this book, I hope to broaden the debate beyond the narrow confines of folklore studies. And this gives me the opportunity to correct some foolish mistakes I made in their initial publication. So, far from being some kind of Greatest Hits collection of singles trying to pass itself off as a new album, these papers have been reworked and restructured into a single book that I hope demonstrates a coherent and explicit trajectory. I have structured the book into five parts: part I is a survey of much of the previously produced research into the folklore/film debates, predominantly from the perspective of folklore studies. These arguments, like the ghosts I talk about in chapter 10, keep coming back to haunt the folklore/film discussions, when most of them belong to a kind of conservatism no longer prevalent in folkloristics. It is my hope that by including this chapter in this current book, we can move the discourse forward. Part II is about methodology and features three chapters. Chapter 2 looks at the film The Wicker Man through the lens of Frazers The Golden Bough, which both director Robin Hardy and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer used as a primary source for the film. Such a folklore reconstruction is a highly

vii

viii

Introduction

dubious methodology, I argue, and this chapter explores some of the problems in uncritical reproductions of folklore. Chapter 3 explores the problems in using the Aarne-Thompson tale-type and motif indexes in identifying traditional narrative forms in popular cinema (in this case, in the modern zombie movie). This chapter does not argue that such a methodology is unproductive, merely that, like folkloric reconstruction, it is highly problematic. Chapter 4 first continues the project started in chapter 3 (using the AarneThompson indexes for filmic analysis) but in a different genrethe comedy. Like with the zombie film, trying to identify traditional tale-types and motifs proves difficult and inconclusive. However, as a step forward, I propose using Walter Ongs concept of the psychodynamics of orality in order to come to a new appreciation of the kind of comic narrative most film critics dismiss out of hand. Ongs concept of orality may be one of the more productive methodologies for seeing cinema from a folklore perspective. Part III looks at belief. Beliefsand the discourses of belieflie at the core of legend telling, and the two chapters in this part discuss those debates, first in reference to two illustrative episodes of the television series The XFiles and then to the cycle of killer bee movies from the 1970s. In two very different ways, these chapters explore how film and television narratives are built on already existing popular culture beliefs but also how films and television shows recycle those beliefs back into popular culture. Urban legends are the organizing principle of part IV. The first of these two chapters outlines a typology for the study of legends in popular film. In order to properly analyze how popular culture disseminates legends, this typology enables us to be more precise in the kinds of adaptation processes available to filmmakers and television writers/producers. The second of these chapters looks at what the legends and, by extension, the films based on those legends might mean through seeing the slasher films of the late 1970s/early 1980s as scripts for social control. There is a further dimension to this chapter insofar as it also demonstrates the challenges to the dominant paradigms of horror film scholarship when one looks at these films as legends. The standard interpretation of the slasher film as being motivated by the psycho-killers punishment for sexual activity is directly challenged by reframing the debate on contemporary teenage fears relevant to their liminal position between childhood and adulthood. The final two chapters that make up part V of this book are about ostensionthe acting out or performing of legends. In the first, I look at the film Candyman not only as about ostension but also as suturing the films own audience into taking an ostensive position by watching the film. Likewise, in the final chapter, I look to the British reality TV series Most Haunted as a

Introduction

ix

kind of ostension as well but also conclude by drawing together a number of threads this book has raised regarding seeing popular culture through the lens of folklore studies. Taken together, these ten chapters summarize my thoughts and work looking at the convergence of traditional folklore with contemporary popular culture. None of these chapters is meant to be definitive; rather, they introduce some key terms of folkloristics, specifically in legend studies, into film studies. And these chapters are meant to redefine for folklore studies what and how we can engage within popular film and television debates.

P A R T

O N E

THE STUDY OF FOLKLORE AND FILM

C H A P T E R

O N E

Folklore and Film

In an issue of Contemporary Legend, Paul Smith (1999) began by decrying the seeming dearth of folkloristic scholarship on popular film. The author noted that there is perhaps a certain irony in the fact that, while such films as Candyman (1992) recognize the role of the folklorist as collector of contemporary legends, very little attention has been given by folklorists to the role of the film and television industry as users and disseminators of contemporary legends (138). Smith went on to give a short list of those few folklorists who have published on popular film and contemporary, or urban, legend. Granting that Smiths focus, on urban legends specifically, is necessarily a limited one, he does omit a number of facets whereby academic folklorists can explore popular film and television. Folklore studies have examined, or at least recognized the importance of examining, popular cinema from a number of perspectives. At one level, folklorists are able to observe and trace the process of homogenizing cultural expressions through the mass media. On the other hand, a great deal of folklore scholarship has explored those traditional narrative types and motifs when they appear in popular film and television, what I call, disparagingly, motif spotting. Yet, still other folklorists have noted further areas for fruitful exploration of popular culture, such as how these texts reflect contemporary belief traditions, ethnographies of fan culture, the rituals involved with popular cultural consumption, narratives about technology and technological industries, and the existence of multiple versions of seemingly fixed texts. These contributions to folkloristics need enumerating. Since 1989, when

Chapter One

Bruce Jackson wrote From the Editor: Wars Dont End in the Journal of American Folklore, wherein he, like Smith, decried the absence of systematic research into folklore and film, much has been published. This chapter is about enumerating the various debates within folklore studies about popular film and television, and, albeit in a secondary capacity, also looking for those few instances where folklore has had an impact on film studies.

Mrchen and the Movies

In 1946, Stith Thompson (1977) recognized cinema as both a marvelous channel of tale dissemination and a kind of storytelling event:
The cinema, especially the animated cartoon, is perhaps the most successful of all mediums for the presentation of the fairy tale. Creatures of the folk imagination can be constructed with ease and given lifelike qualities. Undoubtedly the best of these performances up to the present time [1946] is the Walt Disney production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [1937]. Many adults who had long ago dropped their interest in the fairy tale unexpectedly found great pleasure in this old product of the folk imagination. (461)

For Thompson, tale dissemination via cinema would, he felt, encourage viewers to rediscover these tales. He marveled at the fact that one single text could reach so many people at the same time. Within Thompsons approach to filmed fairy tales was the implicit recognition that the Disney text would be considered but one text among countless other variants. Ceding Thompsons implicit recognition, later theorists, both within folklore studies and beyond, saw the cinema, especially the Disney texts, as an attempt to become definitive, thereby solidifying a single variant. Peggy Russo (1992) observed that traditional narratives can . . . be replaced by bogus visual versions of themselves (19, emphasis added). Russo traced the attack against Disney at least as far back as 1965, when
in a . . . letter to the Los Angeles Times, Frances Clark Sayer criticized Disney for his debasement of the traditional literature of childhood. Sayer accused him of: (1) lack of respect for the integrity of original creations; (2) manipulation and vulgarization of text for his own ends; (3) lack of regard for the anthropological, spiritual, or psychological truths of folklore; (4) fixing his mutilated film versions in books which are cut to a fraction of their original forms; and (5) illustrations of those books with garish pictures, in which every prince looks like a badly drawn portrait of Cary Grant; every princess a sex symbol. (21)

Folklore and Film

The Disney Corporations fixing of their variants into book form (and, in Sayers opinion, the low quality of that form) clearly implicated Disney in assuming ownership of folk narratives by the creation of hegemonically definitive texts. This perception is that the movies fix traditional narratives into single definitive texts that replace the more fluid oral variants. Linda Dgh (1994a) noted,
In the global village (to use the apt term of Marshall McLuhan) created by the media, a new communality has formed on the basis of the homogenizing effect of uniform information and the mass-marketing of stories to a mass society structured into occupational, ethnic, age, sex, religious, and other population groups, also identifiable as folk or folklore-transmitting communities. The even flow of identical information systematically enculturates the citizens of the world, turning them into the consumers of identical cultural goods by creating a symbolic egalitarian social order that supersedes segmentation by national boundaries. (23)

Dgh seems to indicate that folklorists often felt that popular culture, especially through such media as film and television, attempted to homogenize divergent cultures into a single, unified system of consumerists. Local cultures and regional variants, it was felt, were in jeopardy of being taken over by this popular-culture juggernaut.1 For example, Gerald Thomas (1980) noted the role television soap operas played in the Franco-Newfoundland storytelling tradition. Thomas recognized that the same word, contes, was used to refer to both soap operas and to orally told traditional folktales. He ascribed enough similarity between the real life of French Newfoundlanders (and others) and the soap opera plots to suggest a high degree of personal identification (343). What Thomas focused on is the similarity between the two media along traditional narrative formations: specifically Axel Olriks Law of Two to a Scene in soap-opera cinematography and narrative structure (347). However, Thomas also pointed out that soap operas influenced oral folktale performance in the community: before widespread television reception in the region, storytelling performances were more heavily gesticulated, and he hypothesized that the more static style of current folktale performance was due to the influence of television drama and its static performance style (348). Although Thomas made an important observation, the main thrust of his article was the loss of traditional performance styles, and this was in keeping with the perception of the devolutionary influence of the mass media. In the same vein, Elizabeth Tucker (1992) viewed the influence of

Chapter One

mass-mediated versions of narratives as replacing the oral variants previously in circulation. This coincided with Sayers point that Disney versions of traditional fairy tales replaced the original orally circulated text and thereby created a sense of canonicity. Tuckers research was geared to demonstrate that children today were allowing video narrative texts to predetermine their own storytelling performance styles: None of them [the children studied] used anything but video versions as starting points for narrations; to this extent, I can assert that videotape is overshadowing traditional print versions of stories (25). That being said, Tucker noted the importance of video-mediated narrative in developing childrens storytelling repertoires. She mentioned a narrative variant of Cinderella told to her by a four-year-old informant named Emily, who fused the romantic fairy tale with a vampire story.
There was no conflict in her mind between the plot structure of Cinderella and the plot of a typical vampire movie, which seems to be the other model for narration here; she simply took what she wanted from both sources and put them together into her own story. While at least one child in the audience wanted to make sure that the name Cinderella was clearly mentioned, Emily knew what she wanted to do and had the confidence in her own skills as a storyteller. (28)

Tuckers article developed Sylvia Griders (1981) observation that children frequently reiterate plot narratives from their favorite television shows and movies but that these reiterations are highly complex and original storytellings. Grider labeled these narrations media narraforms, defining them [as embodying] a symbiotic relationship between the media and oral tradition: the media provide the content, and oral tradition provides the situations and format for the performance of these contemporary, hybrid narratives (126). Likewise, Kay Stone (1981) noted that Disneys filmed versions of traditional fairy tales, by the retention of the fantastic elements in these stories, allowed the childs imagination to be developed. Like Grider and Stone, Tucker also recognized that
while we should keep an eye on childrens involvement with VCRs, we neednt be too concerned about creativity being wiped out by repeated viewings of stories on videotape. At present there seems to be a productive interdependence between the TV screen and that old-fashioned storytelling device, the mouth. (31, emphasis added)

Tucker noted that although both the mass-mediated and the orally transmitted narratives were at the time able to survive concurrently, such coexistence

Folklore and Film

was likely to be temporary. Implicit in her article is the idea that both could not survive and that the oral was the more likely to die out so that the mass mediated could flourish and dominate. Studies such as those by Tucker, Thomas, and Russo debated whether mass-mediated texts can be considered folklore, primarily because of their medium of transmission. S. Elizabeth Bird (1996), conversely, did not see the means of transmission as problematic:
We need to forget about whether or not popular culture transmits folklore. Rather, we begin to consider that certain popular culture forms succeed because they act like folklore. To some extent they may have replaced folk narratives, but not with something completely new. Thus popular culture is popular because of its resonance, its appeal to an audiences existing set of story conventions. (345)

It is this development, of the ways in which popular culture can behave like traditional folklore forms, that many current studies build on. I have argued elsewhere (1999a) how films like The Joy Luck Club (1993) and How to Make an American Quilt (1995) reproduce womens speech patterns, narrative contexts, and structures or how Schindlers List (1993) can function as ritual storytelling, akin to the Jewish Passover retellings of the Exodus from Egypt (Koven 1998).

Beyond Documentary Cinema: A Neglected Area?

Bruce Jackson (1989) commented that, by and large, folklorists have neglected to examine feature film and television as an area of study, even to the extent that Dorsons Handbook of American Folklore ignores films entirely (388). Or, rather, Dorsons Handbook ignored the feature fiction film as an area of folkloristic study, as there are three chapters, two of which are methodological (Blaustein 1983, 397401; Sherman 1983, 44146) and one presentational (Carey 1983, 50712), on the ethnographic documentary film and videographic methods of field collection. A major and in-depth consideration of the ethnographic film falls outside the purview of this study, but Sharon Sherman (1981) focused almost exclusively on a particular manifestation of the ethnographic film, what she called the folkloric film: Any film having folkloric content might be of use to us, but those films called folkloric films . . . are ones which deal primarily with topics folklorists study and whose intent is to meet the dictates of folk-

Chapter One

loristic research and teaching (16). We might potentially call any film folkloric, but true folkloric films are made by trained folklorists or were made in close consultation with folklorists (Sherman 1996). It is important to recognize here that Sherman exclusively studied the documentary film, not popular-fiction films:
Many folklorists who use film are tied to the models adopted by their documentary-film forerunners and to the conceptual premises of past-folklore scholars. Thus, in folkloric films, the rural often takes precedent over the urban, and the past assumes greater importance than the contemporary. (264)

Implicit in Shermans work is a privileging of the documentary film as the sole discourse for folkloristics. Sherman did note the existence of folkloristic and ethnographic detail within nonfolkloric (i.e., nondocumentary) films, albeit in passing:
A unique twist to the study of film and folklore is the popular use of folklore as the primary plot line or unifying thread for commercial feature films. The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), for example, exploits the practices of voodoo. The urban legend about a baby-sitter frightened by a telephone caller is the basis for When a Stranger Calls (1979). The film Avalon (1990) plays upon family and ethnic narratives to structure the larger narrative of family and ethnic-neighborhood dissolution in the America of the 1940s through the 1960s, using one family as exemplar. When Harry Met Sally (1989) relies on the courtship narratives of many different couples as a transition device. (265)

Karl Heider (1976) perhaps best illustrated the main difference between the ethnographic film and the fiction film when he noted,
In some sense we could say that all films are ethnographic: they are about people. . . . There are many films which have little pretension to ethnographicness but which are of great interest to the ethnographer. I personally feel that The Last Picture Show, about the high school class of 1952 in a small Texas town, is a statement which captures the culture of my own high school class of 1952 in Lawrence, Kansas. Likewise, The Harder They Come (about Jamaica), Scenes from a Marriage (about middle-class Swedish marriage), or Tokyo Story all present important truths about cultural situations. As statements (native statements, in fact) about culture, these films are important, and they could very easily be used as raw data or documents in ethnographic research. I am tempted to call them more than just raw data and think of them as nave ethnography. (5)

Folklore and Film

For Heider as well as for Sherman, the feature fiction film can be seen as native ethnography; that is, although they are neither ethnographic (documentary) nor made by/for ethnographers, the filmic materials may be of interest to ethnographic audiences because the fiction film often depicts an insiders perspective, often complete with an emergent context. However, both perceptions are somewhat limiting insofar as they see popular cinema as tangential to the larger projects of folklore/ethnography. To paraphrase Jackson (1989), such assumptions are neither fair nor accurate, as some folklorists have explored popular cinema. Let me now move on to those scholars who have researched popular cinema in folkloristic terms in order to demonstrate some of these points of conversion.

Motif SpottingMyth, Mrchen, and Legend

One area of popular film that Jackson (1989) recognized folklorists have considered is the area of folklore in film:
With ordinary film, its usually a matter of folklore in film, the equivalent of folklore in Faulkner or folklore in Shakespeare . . . things to be plucked out of a context otherwise lacking folkloric moment. JAF [Journal of American Folklore] regularly reviews films about folklore events or folk processes or folk performers, but it has never published a review or article dealing with feature films or television narratives. (388)

Some folklore studies have emerged that seek to enumerate folklore types and motifs when they occur in popular media, in other words, studies that engage in motif spotting. Motif spotting takes its methodology from the debates surrounding folklore and literature. It has been suggested that the most direct way for individual fiction films to be considered folklore is to follow some of the theoretical writings that tie folklore studies to literature. Neil Grobman (1979), for example, proposed that one must assess how authors use folklore in their writings (17). Following this procedure requires the scholar to identify the author as being in direct contact with folklore and its scholarly debates. The problem with applying the folklore and literature debates to discussions about folklore and popular cinema is that literary texts are produced by individual authors whose connection with folk culture is more readily provable. Cinema and television are much more collaborative communicative media, and, therefore, if one is required to make a connection between the

10

Chapter One

text and legitimate folk culture, whose connection is to be considered authoritative?2 When folklorists have looked at popular mass-mediated texts, they did so in order to identify traditional tale-types and motifs in films. Diverse scholars like Leslie Fiedler and Harold Schechter noted the similarities between Vietnam War movies and traditional hero narratives. Both authors saw in movies like The Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) (Fiedler 1990) and Rambo (1985) and Platoon (1988) (Schechter and Semeiks 1991) similarities between these original texts and the expression of the American Frontier Myth, to use Schechter and Semeikss phrase. The myths expressed in those films, as Fiedler (1990) noted, represent a symbolic effort to bring back home again what we hope can be recuperated in imagination if not in fact: a not ignoble part of us all squandered in an ignoble war [the Vietnam War] (399). Schechter and Semeiks (1991) likewise noted that in the Vietnam War film, the American hero myth was regenerated for the 1980s moviegoing audience. They argued that Rambo and Platoon engaged American audiences with traditional hero narratives. Platoon was an initiatory rite, while Rambo was a captivityescape tale. This appeal to traditional narrative patternings accounts for the films success and not the critical assumption of a decline in the audiences taste. If history were unable to appeal to a cultural perception of the American self, so their arguments went, then through the medium of popular cinema, the culture could regenerate its own sense of worth by righting the wrongs retrospectively, even if only in the context of a fiction film. These are highly functionalist arguments that posited that cinema played itself out for a cultural audience that needed to see its own self-perceptions reified.3 Folklorists have also been concerned with the identification of folktale tale-types and motifs in popular cinema. For some scholars, the Disney effect, taking traditional tales and turning them into mass-mediated and authoritative texts, as Peggy Russo and Frances Clark Sayer noted, could have a potentially detrimental effect on the transmission of these tales. In this light, Thompsons affection for Disney movies seems overly optimistic: as a trained and professional folklorist, Thompson was in the ideal position of recognizing that Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, for example, was but one variant of the narrative tradition, but he saw no indication that children or adults would see these cinematic texts as authoritative. Another point Sayer raised was that these films frequently sanitize the narratives to be so inoffensive as to be almost meaningless: Sayer argued that Disney sweetens or removes the conflict in folklore that allows children to learn the tragic dimension of life, the battle between good and evil, be-

Folklore and Film

11

tween weak and strong . . . [and] all that is good in the human spirit (Russo 1992, 21).4 Elsewhere, Linda Dgh and Andrew Vzsonyi (1979) asked a stimulating question: given their assumption of a decline in the magical worldview, why do television advertisements appeal frequently to magical aspects of the products they are flogging? The authors have understood the folktale as a fictitious genre, and the realistic setting of television advertisements are mere facade. The television commercial is the American adult equivalent of the folktale, for example, magical assistance and promise of riches beyond our dreams. They also discussed how beliefs were manipulated under the fictitious surface of television advertising. In spite of the seemingly obvious recourse to Disney films and the less obvious discourse of television advertising, the dominant area for the identification of traditional tale-types and motifs was the horror movie. This genre appeared to be the one place, next to television advertising, where the magical worldview that the folktale purports could exist without being questioned in a secular context. Of course different forms of magic exist within any number of sacred-belief traditions, but for the secular world, the horror films population of monsters, devils, and hook-handed killers allowed the suspension of disbelief of their existence to function based on the verisimilitude of this genre to the folktale. Alex Alexander (1979) noted the similarities in Carrie (both the novel by Stephen King [1975] and the film by Brian De Palma) and the Cinderella story. This horror story about a young girl who discovers her telekinetic abilities on the eve of her high school prom was told as a modern variant on the traditional fairy tale. Alexander made the easy equation between prom and ball and between her evil mother with the evil stepmother of the folktale. There is even a motif from the Ugly Duckling folktale where the ugly duckling turns into a beautiful swan in Carries movement from gawky adolescent to beautiful young woman at the prom, a motif also present in some of the Cinderella versions. Harold Schechter (1988) also addressed De Palmas Carrie, noting the similarity to folktale-like narratives with which he was familiar. In particular, Schechter dealt with the final image of the film, where Carries arm, as he describes it, suddenly erupts from the grave (27). He noted the same motif, of an arm emerging from the grave (or similar surface), in such films as Friday the 13th (1980) and Deliverance (1974) (in both cases, the arm breaks the surface of a lake). The same image was used to advertise the film The Evil Dead (1984). Schechter traced this single motif back to the Grimm Brothers and their story The Willful Child (29).5 The significance of this observation was that regardless of a films sophistication or its technical complexity, the images

12

Chapter One

a filmmaker uses to tell his or her story are often analogues to traditional folktales. Schechter took these analogues even further:
to look once more at Carrie, howeverwhat we see there . . . is an even more intriguing phenomenon: a pop entertainment which does not simply project nightmares and dabble in dangerous fantasy, but which contains precise parallels to particular and widespread primitive taboos, specifically ones dealing with . . . the dead. (32)

Schechter had likewise done a similar study on the bosom serpent motif in American folklore and drawn parallels to popular cinematic representations. He summarized the bosom serpent story thus: through some unfortunate circumstance or act of carelessness . . . a snake . . . is accidentally ingested by, or grows inside the body of, the unlucky individual, where it remains until it is expelled or in some way lured out of the victims body (20). The wellknown sequence in Ridley Scotts film Alien (1979) most clearly demonstrates this motif, where an unlucky crew member of a space mining expedition is impregnated with an alien life form in his chest that bursts out during the crews supper. As Schechter noted, like the traditional, oral versions that have been popular for hundreds of years, [the sequence in Aliens] only purpose is to produce emotional response: shock, revulsion, morbid fascination (23). In the 1990s, horror movies and series of horror movie franchises have emerged based even more explicitly on folktales than the Carrie example. Horror-movie audiences have been presented with adult-oriented versions of traditional tales, such as Snow White, subtitled A Tale of Terror (1997), and Rumpelstiltskin (1995). In addition, fans of the genre would be familiar with the Leprechaun series (1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996) or even Pinocchios Revenge (1996). But this tradition of making adult-oriented films out of Mrchen is not new: the French surrealist poet, filmmaker, and artist Jean Cocteau made La belle et la bte, an adult reworking of Beauty and the Beast, in 1946. Cocteaus La belle et la bte is also noteworthy for blending the genre of fairy tale with the horror film, and, as I demonstrate later, the horror genres connection is also to the legend. Cocteau filmed the Beasts castle in such a way as to be familiar to anyone who grew up on the hauntedhouse movies of the 1930s. In many respects, what Cocteau did in La belle et la bte is return the folktale to its adult audience by appropriating the visual iconography of the contemporary horror movie.6 Finally, special mention should be made of Frank Hoffmanns research, as we move in this survey from adult-oriented Mrchen to adult Mrchen.

Folklore and Film

13

In his 1965 article Prolegomena to a Study of Traditional Elements in the Erotic Film, Hoffmann noted that pornographic and stag films utilize a number of traditional tale-types and motifs. Basing his study on the collection of films held at the Kinsey Institute of Sexual Research, the author wrote,
I have seen and taken notes on approximately 280 of the Institutes collection of 400 [pornographic films]. Of these, close analysis reveals that 175or better than 60 percentcontain recognizable folkloristic elements. Many of these can be related directly to existing motifs in Stith Thompsons Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, whereas others relate to new motifs which I have developed out of my analysis of collections of erotic folktales. (145)

Within legend scholarship, Julia George (1982) noted that many nonethnographic fiction films seem to exhibit elements of folk narrative, transposed into a visual rather than primarily an oral mode of transmission. The structure of film, as well as the themes, present often parallel traditional storytelling methods (159). She also noted that the horror film in particular shares components of structure and function of urban legends (159). She applied Alan Dundess three steps of legend narrative structure to the horror filminterdiction, violation, and consequences and concluded that horror stories function to scare and to warn; the same seems to apply to horror films (176). I discuss Georges article in more detail in chapter 3. Larry Danielsons (1979) Folklore and Film: Some Thoughts on Baughman Z500599 notes the utilization of urban legend motifs in horror movies, specifically John Carpenters Halloween (1978). He wrote that many horror movies drew heavily on what Ernest Baughman classified as motifs Z500599, stories which are not ghost or witch storiesthey usually do not deal with the supernaturalwhich are told because of the effect of horror they produce in the listener. Usually the emphasis is on the grisly or strange rather than on the supernatural (Baughman, quoted in Danielson 1979, 211). Significantly, Danielsons essay appeared at the very beginning of the slasher cycle of movies in the late 1970s/early 1980s, and he stated that these movies appeal to a variety of urban legends:
Folklorists, in order to understand the psychology of response to these similar themes and motifs, would gain useful insights into meaning and function if their research nets were more broadly flung. We need to keep eyes and ears open for the appearance of the traditional horror story in film, television, and in print. (212)

14

Chapter One

The relationship between the slasher film of the late 1970s/early 1980s and urban legends is developed in greater detail in chapters 7 and 8. Danielson (1979), like Thompson, noted that movies, like television or print media, are a major factor in legend transmission, as well as a reflection of it. But more important, Danielson noted that movies were not folkloric art, although a few dealt with folklore materials. On this latter point, Danielson cited the Japanese film Kwaidan (1964), a cinematic retelling of Japanese ghost stories (the American theatrical release has three stories; the international release available on DVD contains all four). He argued,
The movie is difficult to deal with in folklore classes because its highly refined film art is based on an equally refined literary treatment of Japanese legends in manuscript, which in turn are based on oral traditional narrative. . . . Kwaidan can confront students with the problems of defining text, of the transmission of traditional narrative in modern media, and of the drastic and subtle consequences of media shifts on folk narrative content. (210)

Implicit in Danielsons argument is that such discussions as are raised by a film like Kwaidan are significant for (presumably folklore) students to engage with, yet he held back from presenting such an analysis himself. Motif spotting can also be expressed in folkloristic bibliographies/filmographies, like that by Paul Smith and Sandy Hobbs (1990). Their annotated bibliography noted a variety of legend themes and motifs, described them, and then noted at least one film reference per citation. Given the overwhelming response to this document, the authors also wrote a column in 1992 in FOAFtale News that takes a specific legend and then annotates all its cinematic appearances. Beyond specific folkloristic genres like myth, folktale, and legend, Tom Burns (1969) attempted to develop a methodology for identifying any expression of folklore in popular film and television texts. When an item of folklore is identified in the mass media, Burns proposed a rather rigid paradigm for distinguishing the items validity as folklore. Burns recognized that mass media uses a variety of folkloristic materials (traditional music and song [9193], belief [9397], gesture [97], narratives [9799], proverbs [99100], and custom [100101]), but it was only when they had contextualized these items within a framework of ethnographic verisimilitude that they could be considered true folklore. From this point of view, a true folklore item consists of (1) a traditional text (whether composed of verbal, nonverbal, or mixed components) or (2) a traditional performance of that text in (3) a traditional (customary) situation in

Folklore and Film

15

response to or in conjunction with (4) a traditional audience (90). Other than specific films intended for a specific academic (folkloristic) audience (i.e., ethnographic or folkloric films), very few popular films could maintain this schema.

Contemporary Studies
Contemporary models are likewise challenging the idea that film texts are fixed. Jackson (1989), albeit polemically, noted the assumption seems to have been that since filmmaking is a highly technical occupation, one [that] results in a fixed text, the folk dont have a chance to influence it. Jackson concluded, The assumption isnt useful; neither is it valid (388). With the DVD release of many directors cuts and restored versions, these fixed texts demonstrate a high degree of variation. In addition to these variants, different national and regional film (censorship) boards require different degrees of censorship and editing of films for public display, based on the community standards of the groups where they will exhibit the film. In the United States, for example, the Motion Picture Association of America is an internal form of censorship, even if industry imposed (rather than state imposed). If a studio wishes a film to receive a specific classification (i.e., an R-rated film instead of an NC-17 film or a film released without a classificationthe difference is whether the cinema will permit even accompanied children to see the film), the studio will reedit the film. Many distribution companies refuse to handle unrated or NC17 films for fear of community censure. They will distribute these cutdown, R-rated films domestically but not necessarily internationally. In 1986, I saw a horror movie, The Re-Animator (1985), in the United Kingdom. Great Britain has an external (that is, state imposed) film board (the British Board of Film Classification) that both classifies and censors films according to community standards. I subsequently reviewed the film on videocassette in North America. The film I saw theatrically in Britain was the unrated version (in the United Kingdom, the film received an 18 Certificate, which requires that one must be at least eighteen years of age to see it), whereas the North American video release was the R-rated version. The difference between the two versions is clearly noticeable with regard to the films gore (the R-rated version being substantially less gory), but, furthermore, the humor in the film was based on these gory images, and therefore with the cut-back version they also lessened the humor of the film. This may seem like a minor point to make, but it demonstrates

16

Chapter One

that in fact these fixed texts do exist in multiple versions, and the context of the distribution of these quasi-variants needs further exploration. In addition to these multiple versions of film narratives, as Jackson (1989) noted, we can tell narratives about films. I have already mentioned Sylvia Griders media narraforms, but beyond this coinage, Peter Narvez (1986) studied how changes in technology, like the availability of television, generate new folkloric forms, specifically narratives about technology. Another example of this kind of film-oriented narration is worth noting, especially since it coincides with Hoffmanns work on the pornographic film. Apparently, stories circulated in Hollywood during the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939) about the adult actors playing the Munchkins:
Because [The Wizard of Oz filmmakers] thought of them [Munchkin actors] as like children, the average-sized adults working on the picture could not think of sexual relations between them as anything other than unnatural and stories circulated about orgies among them at the Culver City Hotel. The Disney artists were capable of imagining similar kinds of sexual excess in the seven dwarfs. Suddenly, near the end of the picture, one of the animators later recalled, the tension in the studio was too much. To relieve it, there was a spontaneous avalanche of pornographic drawings from all over the studio. Drawings of Snow White being gang raped by the dwarfs, and mass orgies among the dwarfs themselves. Even the old witch was involved. Some of the drawings were about comic sexual aberrations that Krafft-Ebing would never have dreamed of. The mania went on for about a week, and as suddenly as it started the whole thing stopped. It must have been a form of hysteria brought on by fatigue and the relentless schedule. As far as I know, Walt [Disney] never heard about it. (Forgacs 1992, 371)

Leo Rostens 1941 protoethnography of Hollywoods movie colony is full of apocryphal and anecdotal examples of these kinds of media legends.7 To wit,
In far-off Bombay the magazine Filmindia (which regularly denounces Hollywoods portrayals of India) gave exquisite and unforgettable testimony to the influence of Hollywood when one of the advertisements, for a picture made in India, proclaimed: Brahmin Boy Loves Untouchable Girl! As the Anzac warriors marched across Libya to attack the Italians at Bardia, they sang a chorus from Mervyn Le Roys Wizard of Oz. (Rosten 1970, 78)

These media legends, which are legends and stories about the media, need to be identified in mostly nonacademic sources, like Hollywood biographies and

Folklore and Film

17

fan-culture sources. One of the few academic sources to investigate these media legends is Charles Kelleys (1991) study of the urban legend that the ghost of a young boy who committed suicide can be seen in the movie Three Men and a Baby (1987). Jackson (1989) also recognized that technical sophistication was in no way less folk than more traditional methods of construction:
The complexity of an event or operation has nothing to do with the folkloric interest: absent nostalgia and sentimentality, a trip by stagecoach is inherently no more folksy than a trip in the Concorde, and bread kneaded by the hand is no more folksy than bread kneaded in a Cuisinart. The folkloric interest is determined by the relation of people to the technology, not the presence or absence of technical sophistication. (388)

Studies need to be done on the relationship between product and process to popular filmmaking within an industrial context (working on from McCarl 1974). Todd Gitlins (1983) ethnographic study of the Hollywood television industry or Rostens (1970) study of Hollywood movie colony are but two examples. Narvez (1992) also saw the popular culture industries as engendering their own forms of folklore.

Fandom and Audience Studies

An area that has been emerging as a major area of study for folkloristics within popular culture is the audience ethnography. Jackson (1989) noted that the folklore of audiences was an area needing to be examined. He subdivided this area into specific subjects: the information the audience brings to the experience of a film, the social behaviors adopted while in the screening place, and the ways the contents of films enter general consciousness and style (389). As far back as 1970 though, David Riesman noted,
In America, people do not attend to the media as isolated atoms, but as members of groups which select among the media and interpret their messages. . . . Similarly, people go to movies in groupsespecially teenagers who make up such a large proportion of the audienceand formal and informal fan clubs are of course a way of organizing these groups. . . . People do not read in groups. (256)

Although Riesman was looking at how nonliterate cultures used mass media as a surrogate for oral culture, we may point to this article as the beginning of the kind of audience ethnographic studies that are becoming popular in folklore studies.

18

Chapter One

Peter Narvez (1992) noted that one of the interstices of folklore and popular culture was the expressive use of communications media, mass produced goods, and mass-mediated texts in small group contexts (20). Fan culture is just such a small group context. Narvez (1987) rejected the perception of the popular-culture fan as a passive victim of the mass media.
Fans engage in complex manipulations of mass mediated culture for purposes of status and communication. . . . There are those who display or present signs of favorite performers, and the simulated performances of those entertainers, out of emotional involvement and love, hoping to convert their peers to fandom or at least an appreciation of meaningful cultural events. In communicating and appreciating similar popular performances friendship networks and cultural scenes develop and are reinforced in multifarious domestic and public contexts. (38)

Fan culture is also emergent around specific popular-culture genres like supermarket tabloids (Bird 1992) and romance literature (Radway 1984) or even around specific mass-mediated texts like the television series Star Trek (Bacon-Smith 1992) or movies like Gone with the Wind (Taylor 1989). Elizabeth Bird (1996) summarized the interest fan culture has for folkloristics: If audience members are seen as active in helping to shape the way popular culture is created, they become much more comparable with folk audiences (345). Fandom continues to be one of the more popular areas of cultural studies and folklore research (see also Jenkins and Tulloch 1995; Lewis 1992; Tulloch 2000). Working ultimately from Marshall McLuhans (1964) understanding that television, as medium, is cool (36), Henry Jenkins (1992) argued that television audiences must supply their own interpretations of the content and that these interpretative strategies are highly creative. Beyond this, however, Jenkins noted that enclaves of fans group together, and these fan groups emerge as distinct cultures. Far from syncopathic, fans actively assert their mastery over the mass-produced texts which provide the raw materials for their own cultural productions and the basis for their social interactions (2324; cf. Koven 1997). Jenkins laid down a theoretical model of fan culture that later ethnographies should follow in interpreting fan cultures: he referred to television fans as poachers:8
Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness. Like other popular readers, fans lack direct access to the means of commercial cultural production and have only the most limited resources with which to influence entertainment industrys decisions. Fans must

Folklore and Film

19

beg with the networks to keep their favorite shows on the air, must lobby producers to provide desired plot developments or to protect the integrity of favorite characters. Within the cultural economy, fans are peasants, not proprietors, a recognition which must contextualize our celebration of strategies of popular resistance. (2627)

Further folkloristic studies need to be done on this kind of poaching, for example, the influences of fan culture in popular cinema genres like the action or horror filmsfilm genres that have huge fan bases. Often those fans become filmmakers themselves within those genres. Postmodern studies, which see a kind of bricolage in the creation of artistic texts, are needed to do archaeology on the influences on these films, even to the point of identifying potential oikotypes in film genre history. Audiences also follow other forms of traditional and tradition-like behaviors. Walter Evans (1982) noted,
The adolescent who squirms and perspires his way through a good monster movie participates in an imaginative experience in many ways incredibly close to the complicated and detailed initiatory practices of premodern peoples around the world. Indeed, the complex initiatory pattern echoed in these films lends tremendous power and significance to their otherwise largely incomprehensible grab bag of formulaic motifs. (135)

Although I take issue with Evanss assertion of verisimilitude between traditional rites of passage and the images in monster movies, I do agree that horror movies function as initiation rites within our postindustrialist culture. We can see the action of going to a scary movie as ritualistic, as calendrical (at Halloween), or as a rite of passage. One similar study explored the ethnic film festival as site for emergent liminality (Koven 1999b), but more needs to be done in the area of the social dynamics of specific film genre attendance. James McClenon and Emily Edwards (1995) offered another interesting use of film texts within a folklore context. Within the rubric of belief studies, the authors were trying to assess the belief tradition of incubus and succubus attacks. They argued that given the vast number of incubus-themed movies and noting those movies demographics, incubus-related memorates should be available from those groups who go to the movies. No such memorates were collected from that group, thereby disproving the idea that exposure to incubus films sparked incubus attacks. What few incubus narratives were collected fell outside the films demographics: those people who claim incubus experiences did not watch incubus movies. Movies, in this instance,

20

Chapter One

are expressions of cultural beliefs that experience has informed, not the other way around. What is fascinating about their findings was their unproblematic use of film to discuss culture. For McClenon and Edwards, film is the dominant medium for cultural transmission in contemporary Western culture (i.e., that which determines our Western worldview). But by studying the belief traditions as expressed in contemporary cinema, the authors discovered that the mass media do not inform belief traditions as much as they artistically communicate the belief traditions via the mass media, that is, transmitted through media like cinema.

Conclusion
According to Bruce Jackson (1989),
Film is the dominant narrative mode of our time. Film and television provide much of the sense of community in a mobile and electronic world: the verbal and imaginative referents we utilize in ordinary face-to-face encounters are as likely to come from our separate-but-shared media experience as anywhere else. Film and television are far too important to be left to the media studies and literature scholars. (389)

And yet, although certainly not central to folkloristic research, folklorists have explored certain aspects of popular film and television beyond the documentary cinema. Studies that identify folkloric motifs and tale-types in popular (fiction) films and television have tended to dominate the researchwhether from myth, folktale, legend, or other folkloric sources. Some of these studies suffice to identify the folklore within, while others look to analyze the changes to the storys meanings when transferred/adapted/translated from one medium to another. Next to the motif-spotting research, the most popular (or, rather, prolific) interstice between folkloristics and popular-culture studies is fan ethnography. Cultural studies have adopted ethnographic methodologies from the social sciences in recent years and have been producing substantive scholarship in this area, of which I have only touched the surface. Increasingly, film and cultural studies are becoming more interested in issues of audience from a more experiential perspective, as a counter to a perceived dominance of their fields from ideal spectator types of research. Separated by a decade, both Paul Smith and Bruce Jackson bemoaned the absence of systematic analysis of popular film and television for the dis-

Folklore and Film

21

courses of folkloristics. While not entirely an accurate observation, and albeit less accurate for Smith than for Jackson (because the intervening decade produced a great deal of the material I have outlined here), folklore studies is not film studies, and, while relevant for folklorists to discuss, given the correct contexts, popular cinema remains tangential and an adjunct to the main tenets of folkloristics. But, in order to develop any in-depth research in the convergence between folklore and film, closer consideration and problematization needs to be done on the methods and methodologies that such studies must be predicated on. I now wish to discuss such considerations of methodology.

Notes
1. It should be noted, though, that other folklorists and cultural scholars (see below) argued against this idea that the mass media homogenized culture (cf. Narvez and Laba 1984). 2. James Hodge (1988), for example, outlined his position that the structural opposition of binaries that underlie mythology (good/evil, solar/chthonic) was evident in contemporary science-fiction television shows and childrens fantasy cartoons. Hodge left his remarks at the level of identifying that they, in fact, were present and did not attempt an analysis of meaning. Such approaches are consistent with the motif spotters. 3. It is worth inserting here, even parenthetically, reference to some of the research film scholars have done drawing on shared interests with folklore, specifically regarding structural approaches to myth. Will Wrights (1978) structural study of the Western genre, Sixguns and Society, examined the popular cinema depicting the Old West in Lvi-Straussian terms, revealing the mythic underpinnings of that genre. And following on from Wrights study, Robert Baird (1998) likewise applied syntagmatic structuralism to the revisionist Western Dances with Wolves (1990). Other studies have attempted to do similar with Vietnam War films (Whillock 1990; Williams 1990). Proppian morphological studies have been carried out on films like Fatal Attraction (1987) (Hala 1992) and Hollywood cartoons (Leskosky 1989; see also Cawelti 1976). David Bordwell (1988) wrote a sustained criticism of Proppian film analysis as well. 4. A point that these debates seem to forget is that the Disney canon was not originally intended as childrens entertainment. David Forgacs (1992) noted, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1942), and Bambi (1942) were all designed as films for both young and oldclean, nonviolent, fantasies with songs and happy endings. They were not targeted at a family audience in the modern sense of the termadults accompanying children as the primary spectatorsbut over time they helped bring such an audience into being. Fantasia was something of an exception to this pattern, an odd hybrid of light entertainment,

22

Chapter One

a would-be cultural movie and an experiment for the Disney artists in abstract animation suggested by music. In terms of its reception, it had a strange reincarnation in the 1960s as a hippy film. Now it is being marketed as a childrens/family film (36667). 5. Schechter (1988) also noted that the story The Willful Child contains little but this single motif. 6. Ironically, in 1991, when Disney brought out its version of Beauty and the Beast, it utilized many of the surreal visual motifs that Cocteau had introduced. 7. Rosten (1970) referred to his own work as putting Hollywood under the microscopes of social science (v), but today we would refer to his work as ethnography. 8. Jenkins (1992) acknowledged Michel de Certeau with the idea of poaching: fans become a model of the type of textual poaching de Certeau associates with popular reading. Their activities pose important questions about the ability of media producers to constrain the creation and circulation of meanings. Fans construct their cultural and social identity through borrowing and inflecting mass culture images, articulating concerns which often go unvoiced within the dominant media (23).

P A R T

T W O

THE SEARCH FOR A METHODOLOGY

C H A P T E R

T W O

Based on Some Forgotten Lore: The Wicker Man, Frazer, and the Ancient Celts

In searching for a method for the study of folklore and film, one of the first logical approaches would be to look at those films that appear to be based on folkloreat least in terms that a general public would understand as folklore. The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) is a film of particular interest to folklorists: here is a film that foregrounds and makes explicit the relationship between horror cinema, particularly horror cinema about paganism and witchcraft, and its folkloric roots. The films director, Robin Hardy, and its screenwriter, Anthony Shaffer, have made equally explicit their extensive research into Britains pagan past in order to realize their film. But The Wicker Man is furthermore a central film in discussing the relationship between folklore and popular culture, specifically popular film: for the kinds of research that Hardy and Shaffer have done raises several significant problems in the relationship between these two media. It is these points of convergence that this chapter discusses. The folklore discourse within The Wicker Man coalesces around the films reconstruction of an imaginary Celtic pagan past that has been revived on a remote Scottish island by the fictional laird Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee). In this respect, the film attempts to diegetically revive an un-self-consciously Victorian perception of Celtic paganism. Specifically, the films titular set piece, in which the films protagonist Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is burned alive at the films conclusion in a sacrifice to the goddess Nuada to ensure the islands agrarian prosperity, is based largely on the description of this rite in Sir James G. Frazers (1963) 1922 revision of The Golden Bough.

25

26

Chapter Two

But it is this interpretation of Frazer, of seeing The Golden Bough as a historical rather than a folkloristic description, that colors the entire films folkloristic discoursethe films folkloristic fallacy as I have termed it. This misinterpretation, in many respects, results in a confusion regarding the different genres of oral folklore: Hardy and Shaffer did not seem to recognize that the Wicker Colossus story, as it appears in Frazer and his own sources (namely, Julius Caesars The Gallic Wars), is a legend told about one culture by a different culture. In this respect, as legend, the story that the ancient Celts burned people alive as sacrifices in these wicker colossi needs to be seen not as literally true but as legendary. Elliott Oring (1986) has noted,
Legends are considered narratives which focus on a single episode, an episode which is presented as miraculous, uncanny, bizarre, or sometimes embarrassing. The narration of a legend is, in a sense, the negotiation of the truth of these episodes. This is not to say that legends are always held to be true, as some scholars have claimed, but that at the core of the legend is an evaluation of its truth status. . . . This diversity of opinion does not negate the status of the narrative as legend because, whatever the opinion, the truth status of the narrative is what is being negotiated. In a legend, the question of truth must be entertained even if that truth is ultimately rejected. Thus, the legend often depicts the improbable with the world of the possible. The legend never asks for the suspension of disbelief. It is concerned with creating a narrative whose truth is at least worthy of deliberation; consequently, the art of legendry engages the listeners sense of the possible. (125)

To see the narrative of the wicker colossus of the ancient Celts, in particular their burning of human sacrifices within, as legend is to engage in a debate about whether people really did such a thing, but by a culture other than the one portrayed in the episode. That is, legends are, in addition to negotiations about the possible, negotiations about the other. To see the wicker colossus episode as legend, in part, is to see a negotiation of whether such barbarity could have been perpetuated by non-Christians/non-Romans (depending on the source of the legend), thereby creating a visceral distinction between us (Frazers Victorian Britons or Caesars Republican Romans) and them (the ancient pre-Christian Celts or cultures deserving to be conquered and occupied); the legend genre demands such questions be discussed, even if ultimately discounted. And had the makers of The Wicker Man engaged in such debate or presented the films dnouement as a discursive episode, this current work would be rendered moot. Unfortunately, in a series of interviews and documentaries surrounding The Wicker Man, both Hardy and Shaffer have made absolutely explicit the source materials that inspired the film: namely and primarily, The Golden