When That Bump in the Night Becomes Flesh and Blood
Pondering pure evil in 'Cropsey'
By Marc Savlov, Fri., July 2, 2010
"It was one of the longest criminal cases in New York City history," said filmmaker Josh Zeman, prior to the debut of his documentary Cropsey at Fantastic Fest last September. "And it took us eight years to complete it."
By "us," Zeman means he and his wife, Barbara Brancaccio, who co-directed this unsettling examination of Staten Island child murderer and all-around cultural bugbear Andre Rand, a flesh-and-blood counterpart to the longstanding Staten Island urban legend known simply as "Cropsey." For Staten Islanders the arrest of Rand, a sanitarium janitor whose deranged appearance was straight out of Ed Gein's bad-grooming handbook, failed to put an end to the rumors, myths, and burgeoning psychoses, and, as Zeman and Brancaccio discovered, actually stoked the fires of mobbish resentment and fear. Cropsey lives on in the imaginations and under the beds of the people of Staten Island. Zeman and Bracaccio's film is as much about the nature of fear in a societal setting and the unseen scars left on the psyches of those who remain as it is about a notoriously difficult criminal investigation.
"If we can put it in a human form, we can kill it," said Zeman. "What we found is that you couldn't just say, 'Oh, look, here's a pedophile who's also a human being.' We also had to personify that human being as evil because we can never contextualize crimes against children. We have to be able to say it's the other, because, you know, the ultimate fear is that if a human being – a normal, nonsupernatural person – can somehow hurt a child, then the implication is that you and I could wake up one day and be able to hurt children, too."
That innate fear of mankind's abyssal trenches – where's the blurry borderline between us and them? – permeates Cropsey like a black fog, and more intriguing than even the facts of the case are the myriad ways in which the people of Staten Island have kept the myth of Cropsey, the fiend that wouldn't die, alive, if only in their minds.
"In an effort to separate ourselves from the possibility that we, too, might be capable of such horrific acts," added Zeman, "we have to say, 'No, this isn't a human being; this is a monster; this is the ultimate evil.' And that's why so many of these urban legends take on an almost cinematic quality. Because then it can be made into dark versus light, good versus evil."
Which brings us to the disturbing fact that the events in Cropsey at first feel and then actually play out like a real-life version of A Nightmare on Elm Street, minus the supernatural but featuring a dark wealth of bad dreams, missing children, and one very scary man with the evidence and the outrage stacked against him.
Zeman: "When you're dealing with a lost child, there's such a heightened sense of urgency that people tend to be very fervent about it. It takes on a life or death meaning, and in that way it's actually reminiscent of a war or 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. It permanently scars the lives of everyone involved, everyone in the community. It's such a powerful event that the people in Staten Island were never able to overcome it. But, then again, they also never felt so alive as they did when dealing with that same event."
Cropsey screens Monday through Wednesday, July 5-7, at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz. See Special Screenings for showtimes.