Blanks: Urban Legend (1998)

One of the more unusual 90s slashers, Urban Legend takes its cues from I Know What You Did Last Summer. Once again, it’s about a group of teenagers – including Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Tara Reid, Jared Leto and Joshua Jackson – who are stalked by a hooded killer. The difference, this time around, is that the killer doesn’t just stalk them and kill them, but plans elaborate deaths based around notable urban legends. It’s striking, then, that it’s also the most rural of 90s slashers – where Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer felt poised at the cusp where suburbia gives way to exurbia, here we’re more on the cusp of exurbia itself. From the atmospheric opening sequence, which takes us from the last franchised petrol station to the first independent petrol station on a long and lonesome road, it continually feels as if we’re on the very edge of the woods, or as if the college campus where most of the film takes place is the last frontier before the vast New England wilds. Not only does that frame urban legends as a late extension of American Gothic, but it suggests that the real province of urban legends are the highways and byways where urban life starts to dissipate out into suburbia and exurbia, setting free phantoms and wanderers that are more contained or concealed by the inner city. Those suburban and exurban thresholds are very much the province of Wes Craven’s brand of horror, so it feels right that Robert Englund plays a central role, as the professor of sociology whose expertise and passion for urban legends just might make him the most likely perpetrator. And, if Craven’s films were always poised at the cusp between suburban horror and post-suburban horror, then that’s fulfilled here – as much as the film seems to regress, in space and time, to a world before suburbia, it’s only for the sake of contemplating what might come after it, where urban legends might go when there’s not even suburbia to sustain them.