Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends. Review

Film, Folklore and Urban Legends consists of slightly reworked essays previously published by Mikel Koven between 1995 and 2007, collected with the hope, he says, of drawing “a line underneath these preliminary explorations,” and so that “future scholarship will develop” the ideas contained in the collection. The book is divided into five sections: part one is a partial survey of scholarship concerning film and folklore, part two consists of three methodological studies (of The Wicker Man and Frazer’s Golden Bough, and of the use or misuse of tale-type and motif indices in understanding some horror films and some film comedies), part three is concerned with exploring the feedback-loop of certain legendary beliefs created by their depiction on television and in the movies, part four discusses various aspects of urban legends and their depiction, and part five presents an essay on “ostension,” the enactment of legend in film and on “reality” television.

As a whole, this group of essays provides a useful entry point to many important theories, practices and arguments about folklore and visual narrative, not least because it is in the form of essays aimed at specific questions rather than aiming to serve directly as a primer. The citations and bibliography alone are a valuable resource for anyone wishing to take up the subject. The down side of any such published collection, though, is that while ideas and methods may recur, there is no consistent argument sustained throughout. Everything has the defects of its virtues. Some consistent themes, do, however, hold many of these essays together conceptually: first, the position that mere “motif-spotting” is a pretty sterile enterprise; second, the question of the extent to which popular films participate in the production and dissemination of folklore; and third, an examination of the usefulness, or lack thereof, of applying the methods of folklore to the study of film.

Chapter one is a quick review of many different ways of applying folklore to films and a justification of studying film from a folkloric perspective on the grounds that film is the dominant modern mode of dissemination and propagation of narrative. Chapter two takes on the much-discussed (and much reviled) film, The Wicker Man (1973, directed by Robin Hardy) pointing out the irony that, while entirely reworking its sources, the film itself became a source for modern neo-pagan ritual. Koven here also raises the issue of ostension, which becomes the major subject of his penultimate essay in this volume.

Chapter three, an attack on motif-hunting in zombie films, ends with the observation that the treatment of zombies (and, presumably, other revenants) shows the development of a dialogue between filmed and unfilmed legends. In chapter four, Koven applies, or, in my view, misapplies, some of Walter Ong’s theories of the nature of orality to “vernacular cinema.” While there are certainly elements in the reception of some films comparable with that of living oral narrative tradition (Koven’s main example here is Weekend at Bernie’s, 1989, Ted Kotcheff), and while popular dissemination of the bare narrative of the film is a possible feature of Ong’s notion of “secondary orality,” the film remains a purely fixed text and is perceived as such by the audience. In chapter five, Koven takes on “motif-spotting” in The X-Files, showing that while known folklore motifs can be found in the television dramas, the more interesting folkloric question is how and why certain legends depicted on the X-Files resonate with a contemporary audience. Chapter six rounds out the third section of the book with the somewhat unsurprising conclusion that “killer bee” movies both illustrate and feed contemporary anxieties about environmental threats.

Chapters seven and eight, respectively, discuss urban legends in film in general, and in “slasher” films in particular, concluding that orally circulated urban legends are actually rarely found in popular film and that psychoanalytic readings of apparently misogynistic films neglect the important part played by social scripting (as in cautionary tales) in the “slasher” genre. In the book’s final section, Koven takes the 1992 Bernard Rose film Candyman as a full-scale example of “ostension”—the showing, rather than the recounting, of a legendary text (chapter nine), and in chapter ten discusses the strange case of the British “reality” television show Most Haunted about which a government agency had to issue a report regarding the show’s alleged “fraudulence” while sidestepping the question of whether ghosts actually exist. Koven points here to the entangling of influences and ideologies in the mutual influence among popular belief, popular media productions, and “official” research and belief systems.

While folklorists will find little that is surprising or, indeed, highly controversial here, Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends is a good place to start for anyone interested in working on the intersection of folklore and popular visual media.