by W.D. James

I love this time of year! Partly, that has to do with the cooling weather and leaves turning beautiful hues. Partly it has to do with the seasonal activities like visiting local pumpkin patches (which sometimes have a bluegrass band on hand). A good bit of it though has to do with Halloween. I admit that I like the creepiness of the holiday. It’s fun and interesting. Also, I’m a super fan of low budget horror flicks. That passion stretches year-round, but the streaming services tend to stock up on titles in the lead up to Halloween and they just seem more appropriate as the days become shorter and the holiday approaches.

As such, I would like to make a seasonal movie recommendation: Cropsey.ⁱ For lovers of jump-scares, it might be a little too laid back but, though not a traditional horror movie, it fits the season and raises tons of interesting questions. Directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancoccio weave together several narratives, all rooted in the local community and history of New York’s Staten Island. There is the American east coast urban legend, or folkloric tale, of the Cropsey: a creature who chops up little children and is used by parents to coax their children into good behavior (‘stay away from the river or the Cropsey will get you down there’). Then there is the story of a slew of actual missing children cases on the island in the early 1970s. Finally, and most interesting to me, is the history of several medical and psychiatric state institutions that were located on the island, including a tuberculosis colony and the infamous Willowbook State School.

The horror genre is often described in terms of the intention to frighten, disturb, or disgust. Those are all negative terms, and they naturally repel us, but horror attracts us (or at least some of us). So, there must be some sort of positive element as well. No doubt it has to do with those elements being placed at a distance so that we can experience them aesthetically, not directly. Cropsey taps into the horror subgenre of films set in abandoned institutions and can be seen as, among other things, a meditation on what is going on there. I would suggest we term this sub-subgenre ‘social horror’.

Of the many profound questions the film raises, I’ll focus on three. What are urban legends? What are monsters? What are social pathologies?

What are urban legends?

The film begins with interviewees recounting how they first learned of the urban legend of the Cropsey. It seems to have started with tales told, first, in Boy Scout camps in the region, then it spread more broadly. There was such a camp on Staten Island. Several people recount camp counselors bringing them up to the abandoned ruins of a couple of the institutions and scaring them with stories there. Why the institutions? What’s scary about them?

We’ll get into more detail below, but word had leaked out of the institutions about ‘bad things’ happening there. Also, the residents/patients, by being segregated out from the general population, were clearly people who were ‘other’, different, sick, messed up, wrong. Also, I would suggest we intuitively know such places should not exist. The conglomerate of institutions on Staten Island (ware)housed up to 17,000 souls. Willowbrook alone, which had been designed for up to 4,000 residents, had 6,000 children living there at its operational peak.

Then the film introduces the theme of the missing children. As if to say: there is this legend, and here is possibly ‘the real origin of that’: someone had taken numerous children and presumably killed them (the remains of only one had actually been found). Though the film is actually not that reductionistic. It’s sort of a chicken and egg dilemma: does the legend come first or does the ‘actual’ historical event come first? I don’t think you can get to the bottom of that really. Some historical events tap into primordial human experiences (harm coming to children may be one of these) and hence we just have an interpretative circle: there is a primordial pattern (myth/legend) of certain universal experiences, there are actual experiences that fit that pattern, which in turn feed back into the myth/legend and develop it, possibly just in the form of a local variant.

So, whatever, the actual events on Staten Island, there is already the archetypal story of someone taking kids (the ‘boogeyman’), the historical events evoke that preexisting story pattern, and give rise to an evolution or new version of the story: the Cropsey. Urban legends, like other myths, are both ‘false’ if we mean did they exactly happen and truer than true if we mean do they encapsulate universal human experiences.

What are monsters?

One monster discussed by the film is, obviously, the legendary Cropsey. He takes kids. That is super wrong. They are innocent, even if none of the rest of us are. He kills. Probably he sexually molests. He is presented as having hooks or knives in place of hands. He is something other than really human. He is at least as ‘sick’ as the people society had warehoused there. The monster is the inhuman.

Another monster discussed in the film is the actual person who was convicted of two of the abductions. Andre Rand, born Frank Rostum Rushan. He is presented as a predator; a pervert; an outsider (vagrant); foreigner (his original name). He had worked at Willowbrook for a couple of years in the late 1960s. There are hints and rumors that he was involved with Satanic cult activity. There is a photo (above) of him drooling. He’s like the people they locked up there; but worse. His purported victims? Most of them were children (and one young adult) with developmental disabilities. Irony? Rand reportedly feels they were subhuman and didn’t deserve to exist. A monster.

What is startling is the fact that he was convicted twice on circumstantial and very contestable evidence. Law enforcement and legal experts involved with the case admit feeling lucky to get the convictions. The community needed the convictions though. To ‘close some cases’. So, he was convicted. Is there not something monstrous, perhaps, going on there?

What are social pathologies?

The film very perceptively and suggestively (but without being overt or ham fisted), keeps returning to the background of the institutions. The film makes the point that Staten Island was just a dumping ground. New York city dumped the garbage from all the other boroughs there. The mafia dumped bodies there. Society dumped its refuse there, in the institutions. This is where my personal interest really comes to the fore.

Institutionalization

Large, government operated, institutions developed hand-in-hand with the rise of the human and social sciences in the 19^th century. These sciences allowed individuals and societies to be known quantitatively. This allows, in theory, for effective interventions to perceived maladies to be developed. Statistics (literally, ‘the math of the state’) was and remains the dominant tool in constructing this knowledge. The statistical study of human phenomena revolves around distribution patterns. Problems emerge where individuals deviate from the statistical norm (ie, from the mean of the distribution pattern). As Wolf Wolfensberger notes in The Origin and Nature of Our Institutional Models, “A person can be defined as being deviant if he is perceived as being significantly different from others in some overt aspect, and if this difference is negatively valued.”ⁱⁱ

According to this way of approaching things, the ‘deviant’ needed to be segregated out from society and ‘treated’ scientifically. Institutions emerged as the preferred instrument of achieving this because they could be constructed rationally to facilitate study, and to manage the populations housed there, and it was easier to study the ‘deviant’ if you put them all in one place together. As with most modern enterprises, the inherent logic led to them becoming ever larger. Wolfensberger observes: “As usual, the irresistible trend toward enlargement was, at first, rationalized as being for the benefit of the resident.”ⁱⁱⁱ This was for a couple of reasons; it was felt that ‘deviants’ would prefer associating with ‘their own kind’ and this was to allow for an array of highly specialized medical and psychiatric experts to be present to ‘care’ for the residents (historically, this array of specialists never really emerged as institutions were habitually underfunded and understaffed; and they just weren’t pleasant places to work). However, he notes, “others were more candid and advocated enlargement as a means of reducing cost…”.^iv

It is not hard to imagine how institutions which were meant to do good (that may not completely be the case, but assuming we grant it) can, through the very logic of bureaucracy and the administrative state, turn into hell. Ivan Illich (pictured) has pointed out that whenever we try to institutionalize goals for people, we invariably end up fixated on the means and lose track of the goal. Imagine the following scenario. The institution has a certain budget which provides a certain level of care. To begin with, that is probably a pretty healthy budget: the governmental officials will want to ‘show off’ the place for a while. The institution produces certain measurable outcomes: number of people housed, maybe even number of people ‘rehabilitated’, scientific knowledge gleaned from studies conducted there, etc…. The far away decision makers (and they are always far away), working to meet a plethora of needs and demands with finite resources, start ‘economizing’. We call that empirically based decision making, don’t we? Can we put a few hundred more people in there on the same budget? Can we just cut a certain percentage of the budget (which will reduce the number of care providers)? No one is actively meaning to be evil. They may even be ‘trying their best’ within the framework at hand. At most, they are probably negligent. It is easy to see how over a few decades, with no one really caring very much about the people who had been put there and not really knowing what was going on, we get the scenes of one worn-out staff person trying to care for a whole ward of naked, filthy, and traumatized children. It is logical.

Exposure

So, society had created institutions under two motivations: the modern urge to scientize all issues and the darker social psychological reason of removing the unhygienic from view. Both were eventually exposed as inhuman.

All of the states in the US, as far as I am aware, established large psychiatric and other institutions, generally starting in the mid-nineteenth century. Europe had similar institutions, but I’m not as familiar with the history there. None of these were really closed down until the 1970s and 1980s and many are still not fully shuttered. They were only eventually curtailed due to heroic efforts of reporting and exposure. There were two main instances which initiated this.

The first was a 1965 photo exposé entitled Christmas in Purgatory.^v Burton Blatt and photographer Fred Kaplan arranged tours of several institutions. Kaplan had a camera hidden within his belt. Pennhurst State School in Pennsylvania was one of the places they went. They were able to show via the photographs they captured there, that these state-run institutions were not really schools, not really places where people received care, and, in fact, were rather hell-like. They self-published 1000 copies of the “photographic essay”. Eventually, this was enough to trigger some form of public response, led by Senator Robert F. Kennedy.^vi This stirred some public interest, but was eventually buried.

The second instance involved Willowbrook. To those of us growing up before the turn of the current century, the media personality Geraldo Rivera is probably most associated with sensationalism, reality TV, and schlock journalism. However, back in the day, Geraldo was a legit investigative journalist (remember those?) and was instrumental in the de-institutionalization movement that was central to improving the lives and opportunities of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). Rivera was a local New York television reporter and would be awarded the Peabody for his work on Willowbrook. In early 1972, he was admitted to several wards in the school by a recently fired doctor at the institution. The doctor had tried to persuade the parents of children there to organize to demand better conditions and was sacked. He and Rivera illegally went back in. What Rivera witnessed, and recorded, sickened, disgusted, and horrified him. Scores of children with I/DD lying and sitting around in large rooms, mostly naked, all covered in their own filth. Moaning and misery. Illness and stench. Inhuman. Rivera reports that there was maybe one staff member to 50 children. The current standard ratio in the state in which I live, for the sake of comparison, is a maximum ratio of one support staff to four individuals; it is more often one-to-one or one-to-two. The ‘system’ is still a system, but elements of decentralization and community inclusion have been adopted. His reportage aired as Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace.^vii The actual video evidence, brought into people’s living rooms on their televisions, was too much to sweep under the rug forever.

Pathological

A turning point in the film is when a former detective reveals what was behind the picture of Rand drooling. While in custody, the police, knowing his connection to Willowbrook, asked if he had seen the Rivera story. He had not. Would he be interested in seeing it? Yes, he would. They took him to a hotel and showed him the video. He commented that they, the children, were not the only victims of the place: that to work there was also dehumanizing. As a result of watching the footage, he became despondent and visibly ill for several days. It was while exiting the hotel that same afternoon that the photo of him, which would be plastered all over the newspapers, had been taken.

Other than pointing out that the evidence against him was circumstantial, the film does not really seek to exonerate Rand. Though they only allude to it, he had previously been convicted on other charges of harming children and sexual abuse. He is clearly a controlling and manipulative personality. He is probably not a nice man, but he was probably also something of a victim. At the very least, his mother had also been committed to a psychiatric institution when he was still a child.

It is a stacking Russian-doll situation of pathology. There is the society that sees it as rational and scientific to lock away their disabled children, and others, in large institutions. There is a community that is as much human refuse, in many ways, as the physical waste exported to their island and the ‘patients’ put there. There is the legend of the child-harmer. There is the embodiment of that myth, whose childhood had been shaped by the institutionalization of his mother, whose adulthood was shaped by his employment in a similar institution, and who perhaps then embodied the spirit of those institutions by attacking children. Rand is not the ‘stranger’. He is the personification of the island. Perhaps that is why he had to be hated. Society looks at the image of itself and cannot accept what it sees: there is the horror.

So, if you’re interested in a film that fits the seasonal mood and is related to, but different from, the usual horror movies, let me point you to Cropsey.

i A 2009 documentary available to watch here: Cropsey – Urban Legend Documentary – Full Movie – YouTube

ii Wolf Wolfensberger, The Origin and Nature of Our Institutional Models, Human Policy Press, 1975, pp. 2-3

iii Ibid, p. 30.

iv Ibid, p. 30.

v A PDF of the full book can be found here: Microsoft Word – test.doc (mn.gov)

vi To their credit, the Kennedys have long been advocates for the intellectually and developmentally disabled. Robert and John F. had a sister who was disabled, though this was somewhat ‘hidden away’ by the family for a long time. Another sister, Eunice, founded the Special Olympics.

vii The original video of Rivera’s report can be viewed here: Willowbrook – YouTube