Urban legend comes to life in creepy documentary set on Staten Island

CROPSEY (Joshua Zeman & Barbara Brancaccio, 2008)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
June 4-10
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com/films/cropsey
www.cropseylegend.com

When we were kids, one of our friends delighted in telling us over and over the story of Cropsey, a supposedly invented child-murdering creep who threatened all children everywhere. (We still think of the monster every time we pass by the Cropsey Ave. exit on the Belt Parkway.) Directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio go in search of the real Cropsey in a fascinating documentary that brings to frightening life the scary urban legend. In 1987, Jennifer Schweiger, a thirteen-year-old girl with Down syndrome, disappeared in Staten Island not far from the abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution, a horrific place where unheard-of abuses had been detailed by a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera fifteen years earlier. The community, led by such activists as Donna Cutugno, came together to try to find Jennifer’s body while the police focused on Andre Rand as the possible perpetrator. Rand refused to say anything as the cops also sought to link him to other area disappearances, including that of Holly Ann Hughes in 1981. Through archival news footage, recent interviews with many of the primary figures involved in the case, and attempts at a face-to-face meeting with Rand, codirectors Zeman and Brancaccio reveal a dark side of humanity that still has devastating effects on a tight-knit Staten Island neighborhood in desperate need of closure.