Chilling texts spread urban horror myths
I ONCE read an interview with the horror film director Wes Craven in which he identified the primal fears that his movies play on.
His Nightmare on Elm Street series (about the murderous ghost of a child killer, Freddy Krueger) touched on many of them: the malevolent parent figure, the sharp implement, heights, and so on.
I was reminded of this when I came across a horror story last week, one which purported to be true but turned out to be as fictional as Freddy Krueger.
The story, spread via thousands of text messages, was that a three-year-old girl had been abducted in a branch of Asda in Huddersfield.
Staff locked the doors and carried out a search. They found the girl in the toilet where two Romanian women were shaving her head and dressing her in boy's clothes.
Asda said the story was totally false, and that it comes around every few years, in the US as well as here.
Although it has a happy ending, with the girl being found, this story fulfils the criteria that Wes Craven lists, and adds some others.
It has fear of losing a child, of foreigners, of gender confusion, and of the impotence of officialdom (how did these sinister Romanians get into the country in the first place?)
It also taps into a modern fear, familiar to anyone who has tried to combine a supermarket trip with looking after a toddler. Attached to this is the fear that, should something dreadful happen to your child, your grief would be compounded by feelings of guilt.
It's a nightmare brilliantly dramatised in the opening of the Ian McEwan novel, A Child In Time, in which a father very plausibly loses his daughter in a supermarket, returning alone to face her mother.
The sharp implement - the razor - is there in the Asda hoax. What about the fear of heights?
For some reason, I picture the girl being made to stand on a toilet or a sink as her head is shaved, so apparently my subconscious has that one covered too.
There's also the ghost of the Holocaust in the shaven-headed child.
And the story is just vague enough to be deeply unsettling. What is the child being kidnapped for? Is it part of some wider conspiracy or a pathology confined to the sinister partnership of the Romanian women? Not knowing, we shudder to think.
There's something about the story that invites the horror film of the mind to start rolling, in particular its soundtrack ...
The camera would lead us through the doors of the toilet, where we'd hear what was going on before we saw it: the child's muffled cries as she tried to be brave, the relentless buzz of the clippers and the falsely reassuring, foreign-accented voices of the kidnappers ...
Is it me, or is it cold in here?
The fact that this made-up story keeps resurfacing, and is apparently eagerly distributed by those receiving the texts, is a reminder that part of us enjoys being frightened.
The story joins a tradition of 'urban myths' which, like horror films, satisfy our subconscious need to give form to our fears.
None of which excuses the hoax itself, which was irresponsible and malicious.
I hope whoever carried it out turns their lurid imagination to some less harmful pursuit. Scripting horror films, perhaps.
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Wednesday 08 February 2012
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