Cropsey: A Movie Review

"You know me and [Ted] Bundy are alike in many ways. We both used Volkswagens. Bundy's thing was women. My thing is kids," said Andre Rand, convicted child kidnapper and suspected serial killer, according to the New York Daily News. Rand is the subject of the chilling and supremely unsettling documentary Cropsey.

Part Blair Witch Project, part investigative thriller, Cropsey opens with a series of interviews with New York campers each detailing their version of the Cropsey urban legend. While they all differ slightly, each involves a sinister man taking out his vengeance upon camping children.

For documentary filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio, Cropsey was an escaped mental patient who lived in the Willowbrook State School (a mental institution) on Staten Island. He would come out late at night and snatch up children off the streets. Cropsey was always out there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to get them.

For Staten Island this urban legend turned out all too real. As Zeman and Brancaccio investigate a series of child abductions from the 1970s and 80s, the highly publicized searches for the children, and the subsequent arrest and trial of Andre Rand, a series of eerie coincidences unfolds. And more and more questions arise, none of which are answered in the film. Leaving the audience with a very unsettled feeling and a strong urge to race home and check on the kids.

However, Cropsey is not just a TV true crime special or a creepy jaunt through a dimly lit woods and abandoned mental institution after hearing tales of horror and murder. It also functions as a provocative cultural critique.

The bogeyman, Rand, was captured in 1987 with the body of 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger only feet from his campsite. He had been a former employee of the Willowbrook State School before taking up residence on the grounds once the school was shut down due to public outcry. The school had a long and sordid history starting with ethically suspect hepatitis vaccination experiments being conducted on the mentally retarded and seemingly abandoned children.

After a tour of the facility in 1965, Sen. Robert Kennedy called the school "a snake pit...not even fit for animals to live in." The school had a maximum capacity of 4,000, but by 1965 was housing more than 6,000 children. After numerous complaints of sexual and physical abuse, a young investigative reporter named Geraldo Rivera, broke the story with a series of investigative reports into the deplorable conditions at the school. Some of the images of barely clothed children huddling in dark corners and cadaverous zombies writhing in the dark halls and tunnels of the facility are hard to forget. That this madness was state sanctioned and funded, seems unfathomable today.

Along with archival footage from Geraldo Rivera and Ernie Anastos reports, Zeman and Brancaccio conduct interviews with locals and police involved in the searches for the missing children. They also carry on correspondence with the convicted kidnapper Rand for several years-at times verging on the bizarre.

Cropsey is an unsettling journey into the seedy underbelly of New York City's forgotten borough. And a reminder that truth is more terrifying than legend.

Sources:

Cropsey Legend.com

Heidi Evans, 'HANNIBAL LECTER OF STATEN ISLAND' Sex fiend trial revisits '80s case, NY Daily News

Steve Dollar, Staten Island Boogeyman Haunts Anew, Wall Street Journal