The Dark Truth Behind Hook Man Candyman and Killer Clowns

➡ The article discusses a film that explores urban legends, focusing on the ‘hookman’ legend and the ‘poison candy’ legend. The ‘hookman’ legend, about a crazed killer with a hook for a hand, is believed to have been inspired by a real-life murder case from the 1950s and was used to scare teenagers away from car culture and premarital sex. The ‘poison candy’ legend, about poisoned Halloween candy, was based on a real incident in 1974 where a man poisoned his son’s candy for insurance money. The article suggests that these legends are often used as a form of control, and that they influence and are influenced by popular culture, such as films.
➡ The text discusses how fear is used to shape behavior through urban legends, such as the Kukui, albino alligators in New York’s sewers, and killer clowns. It highlights how these stories, often based on real events, are used as deterrents or warnings. The text also explores the urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs, which is based on real cases of babysitters being attacked. Lastly, it mentions the existence of urban legend experts who study these stories and their impacts on society.
➡ The documentary explores urban legends, focusing on their origins and how they’ve influenced popular culture. It delves into the story of the Phantom Killer and the hook archetype, which inspired movies like Halloween. However, the film is criticized for not maintaining this depth of exploration for all the stories it covers, and for including irrelevant information. Despite its flaws, the documentary is appreciated for its unique approach to urban legends.
➡ This text discusses a documentary about urban legends that the author found thought-provoking, but not necessarily a top recommendation. The author wishes the documentary had modernized and explored more recent urban legends. The text also mentions a lighter, kid-friendly documentary called “Faces of Death” and promotes a comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions. The author ends with a rap verse, possibly from a song.

A lot of these urban legends, they take from the real, but it’s a way of control. Right under the docks. Yeah, under the docks. Buried deeper we breaking the locks under the docks. Under the docks yeah, under the docks. Welcome back to under the Dock sports spooktacular festivities. We are kicking it off again. You got Paranoid American and Sean Chris. What’s up? Spooky Killer Legends 2014 film directed and narrated by Joshua Zeman. This film is now explores urban legends. And the last film of this Beware of Slender Man. We focused on one urban legend. This one kind of goes and dves in a couple more.

It. It basically starts with the hookman legend because again, like everything, whatever reference point comes from you, and that’s Joshua kind of heard. Heard about this hookman legend and, and was scared of it. So it kind of inspired him to write this film. I heard the hookman legend growing up. This is one of the very first horror story things that I came across that felt a little bit more real than ghosts and monsters and supernatural stuff. And the basic premise, if you’re not familiar with the hookman legend is that this teenage couple is out on a date.

This always takes place in the car somewhere and they’re making out or something. And the girl keeps hearing like a scraping noise and lets the boyfriend like, oh, what’s that noise? Whatever. And eventually when they drive away, they find some variations. They find hook gashes in the top of the roof of the car. Some of them the hook is attached to like a handle somewhere. It’s on the back of the trunk. And the premise being that there’s some crazed maniac killer out in the world that has a hook for a hand. And they almost succumb to them and they thought it was nothing.

And we’re just like, oh, it’s a tree branch that’s scraping across the top of the car. And know it was actually this crazed psycho killer sliding the course right here. I think the claims that they make not going to focus mainly on claims. I’m going to kind of break down some of these urban legends and kind of what they equated to with real life because in this film he kind of explores like how urban legends are created. Right? Like we hear something like you were talking about the hookman and you know, everybody’s scared. It’s around the campfire, hey, we’re all, there’s a bunch of kids.

And then a guy comes and ah, like right to. To just scare people. But a lot of them are based on real events that are then Molded into these and wrapped up into the urban legends. And the first one, as you were talking about the hookman hookman, as you explained what that was, just to brief it up. This legend is about a couple parked in a car and they. They hear the scraping. What is it? Well, this actually kind of is based on real truth from a 1950 murder of Mary Elizabeth Burner in Texas where the couple was parked.

And the details vary, but the fear of them unknown assailant was a hook with a hand reflected. And the anxieties that made it more scarier. And there was also this phantom killer or what I think. I’m sure it was phantom killer, but that’s what they were calling the phantom or whatever. And they kind of molded these together. And it wasn’t even necessarily the same thing. There was no hook involved in the murder, but it kind of represented they were talking about there was sexual assault and like, maybe like a gun was used as in sexual assault, and somehow that gun kind of transformed into a hook.

The. The other interesting sort of observation this documentary makes about this particular hook legend and the phantom killer legend is that it was also based around scaring teenagers away from car culture. Because now teenagers were getting into wrecks and causing all sorts of problem on the roads. And this like premarital sex. So you don’t want to have two teens driving around in a car in the middle of the night and then making more kids. So that this hook legend might have also been sort of like perpetuated by this concept that everyone is trying to come up with the reasons for them to not be on the road and to not be on this date.

So it kind of creates a creepy Aesops fable to like, teach teens to not be out at like Lovers point in the middle of the night in dad’s car. Yeah, that’s exactly true. Because that people don’t realize, especially nowadays, we don’t even us, I don’t think we really experience. Experience makeout spots. Right. In the 50s and 60s, people are dry. Like kids would drive to like, like you said Lovers Lane or like this hilly area where they could get away from the adults and kind of like, you know, get a little, you know, and that. But now it’s like.

But you might die if you do that. Yeah, yeah. So it’s to scare them off. Like I. That one was an interesting one to me. The other one was the poison candy. I mean, I. I don’t know if everybody’s heard the poison candy. It’s almost similar like the. The razor blade in the apple. Right. Like, and not only because they kind of talked about the hook band one too. A lot of these is not only with what people say, but they like push this through film as well. Right. And film kind of tells you, right? You’ve seen like a Michael Myers film and the kid eats apple and his blade in it and bus open.

Well, the poison, the poison candy. It turns out it did happen in, in 1974, a man named Ronald O’ Brien poisoned his son with cyanide laced Halloween candy to get insurance money. Right. So it did happen. But that case again was, I think you made a good point that a lot of these urban legends, they take from the real, but it’s a way of control, right? They’re like, okay, well we don’t want you just like going up to strangers, want to be careful. Or it could have been just like, you know, a big dad that and mom, that’s a little heavy set.

And they’re, they want their Halloween candy and they’re like, we gotta go through it. You know what I mean? There might poison in it. Yeah. They were actually having interview footage from Ronald o’ Brien before I believe he got the, the death sentence, but before he died in jail. They’re interviewing him and then the ball’s on this guy because they’re like, so what do you think, you know, about all of the hysteria that’s come up over this about Halloween? He’s like, well, for one thing, Halloween safer. Like he’s kind of patting himself on the back that, that, you know, he fed his own son poison to get 100 grand insurance policy.

And he’s like, I saved Halloween. It’s safer. Now you can hold your applause, right? It was kind of a weird thing and I guess I never put together that the whole poison in your candy and the razor blades and the apples and the movie Candyman was kind of connected. And here’s what’s even more wild is that the movie Halloween that you just mentioned and the Michael Myers, like the original version of Halloween, I think he just had a white bag over his head. And then he didn’t have the, the, the Captain mask. Forgot the Star Trek dude that was in a William Shatner mask.

He didn’t have the William Shatner mask, but they did have this white bag over his head. So now you’ve got this like weird connection between these different Halloween movies and that the Candyman movie took place in these projects where some of the other urban legends came from. But the, the name Candyman itself actually refers to this Poison candy. But the rules of Candyman actually link to, like, the Bloody Mary rules. Like, you can’t say, or Beetlejuice rules. It’s kind of the same thing that you can’t. But it’s weird how all these different urban legend kind of borrow little bits about each other, and they kind of build on each other.

Like, for example, maybe we don’t have a Slender man without a Candyman, and you don’t have a Candyman without a phantom killer. And all these different things connect, and you can almost pinpoint a weird catalyst. Like, if we didn’t have this phantom killer that came from the. The Hook story from the 50s and 60s, maybe we don’t have any other urban legends. Or they’re 100 different. I. I totally agree with that because I think it changes the course of what it is. Like, you don’t know. Like, because it seems like it’s now used as control, right? A control mechanism of, like, you don’t go in there.

Like, it’s like in growing up in California, Southern California, being around a lot of different Mexicans, like, they would be like, oh, kokui. Hey, you better not do that. The Kukui is gonna get you, right? Like, which is like a mythological, like, crazy creature that’s gonna, like, kill you. Hey, better clean your room. Or the Kukui is gonna get, like. That’s just to do simple, regular tasks that we’re using. And I think that’s just a part of, like, the evolution of humans, is that we’ve used fear in different ways to, like, adjust behavior. And this is kind of like what we get by doing that.

Another example of that is in New York, like, New York City, the rumor about the albino alligators that live in the sewer system, again, is like a deterrent. Like, don’t go down there. There’s an alligator down there. Another one I thought was good is the. The killer clowns. I mean, that there’s a lot to the killer clowns. I mean, I don’t know about you. I think it might have been later on, but still. You mean you got the killer clowns from outer space? Which for me, man, when I was little, I, like, would watch it, but, man, it freaked me out.

I don’t know why, but I’ll be like, dude, this is insane. Like, the killer clowns from outer space, but really, it’s based on none other than the one and only John Wayne Gacy. You know what I mean? Him being a serial killer and being a clown, actually, which is always insane to me. Like that’s one of those things you’re like, what, like being a clown. And I think they interact those stories of like, oh, these killer clowns. Because this guy, it’s, it’s the truth. But now it’s like every clown you got to be care aware of.

And I think that even brought up a phobia. I don’t know if I, I’m sure people were scared of clowns because it’s kind of, you know, for a kid five years old, I think I got four years old, five years old, they got me a clown for my birthday and I was just like, whoa. And I’m running away from it. Like, I don’t know what this thing is, man. And then when you have John Wayne Gacy in those murders, I think it really solidifies this whole killer clown urban legend. I mean, maybe this is a red flag, but I always liked clowns growing up.

They were showing clips of Bozo the Clown on this part of the documentary. And I remember that I loved Bozo the Clown, bro. I love the little game where you have to throw like a ping pong ball in a bucket and you got to win all these prizes. I absolutely loved going to the circus and seeing clowns. It was like one of my favorite weird characters. I never, when I first heard the first time that I even realized that people were afraid of clowns. I think it was the movie Problem Child and it’s when they, they adopt the problem child and his whole room is like decked out in clowns and they make it all creepy.

I remember thinking in that moment, like, man, I’m tougher than the problem child. Like, okay, like I can deal with clowns aren’t scaring me. And then I read about John Wayne Gacy later on in life, but John Wayne Gacy, like, he was a super creep. But what, like the clown part wasn’t the creepy part, it adds to it, but just him himself. You know what doesn’t get mentioned enough about John Wayne Gacy is how close he was able to get to high ranking politicians. If anything, I would say that it’s scarier when a politician, like a guy snobbing up the politicians, turns out to be a serial killer than a clown.

Because when I look at a clown, how much social weight does a clown throw around? They’re not like leading the charge on anything. No one’s following the clown trends or anything. But if you got connections to politicians, like now you’re talking about actually being able to change society and kind of hide amongst them as A clown, bro. Like, you’re not hiding. Like everyone can see you. Well, clown, politician, you know, same difference. And then like one of the last ones I’ll. I’ll explore because they do kind of get into the Slender Man a bit. But like, we’ve kind of like went pretty balls deep, if you will, for that on the last episode.

But this is another one of the scaring people is the babysitter and the Man Upstairs, right? This one to me seems more like a campfire one. Like, I don’t know if you ever can camping. Like when I was growing up, you’d go camping and some, you know, the crazy drunk uncle be like, I got a story. You know what I mean? And then that’s where they start telling a story and it, it seems real. It feels like you’re a part of it. And then like they, they get everybod there and the suspense builds and then someone like, you know, hits you with the tree branch or someone jumps out at you to like really get that impact of scare.

And that’s like again, another tool, I think, because, you know, at the time, babysitters, you’re getting babysitter, that’s anywhere from 13 to probably 17 years old, maybe 18 years old. A young adult, a teen, a teen to a young adult that is needs a little scaring of like, hey, don’t just bring people over. There might be, you know, I mean, be aware of what’s going on. The babysitter with the Man Upstairs theory. I mean, this is basically every babysitter horror movie that’s ever come out. It’s that once a babysitter is in a, you know, foreign house and is watching some kids that aren’t theirs, that someone’s going to come and attack them.

And this one also is the exact same thing as the call is coming from inside the house. It’s the same urban legend kind of separated. But if you’ve seen like the movie Scream, right? That’s the big scene is that the call is coming from inside out that also is based on this babysitter and Man Upstairs archetype. And that every one of these archetypes is based on something real. And in this case, it’s kind of a tragic story where a series of babysitters really were getting tortured and murdered. And the worst things you can possibly imagine happening to a teenage babysitter was happening to them.

And one of those cases, they found a black guy that was essentially like, wasn’t competent enough to stand trial. And based on even a lot of people that were critical of it, saying that he wasn’t competent enough to do anything with these girls. Even if he had come across them, he didn’t have the, the mental capacity to like plan something out. But he did have a history of domestic violence with his wife. And he, I guess he killed his wife or he almost killed his wife. So he immediately gets picked up as the person that is killing these, these babysitters all in town.

And then doing this, you know, backward, like decades later into the future. They’re like, well, let’s look into this. And it seems across the board no one today actually believes that the guy that got sent away did any of these murders that make like he might have had his own skeletons in his closet, you know, the domestic violence stuff. But he’s not the one that was killing babysitters. It was actually this guy called Robert Mueller and he’s the one that did it. And they even show you exactly how. But he’s dead and all of the evidence is gone and like some of the houses have been knocked over.

So it’s one of those things that you can speculate and you’ll never really know, but this was a re. It was a real thing that was happening. Babysitters were dying in and it. And it fed into this urban legend that turns into like a violent Aesop fable to get you to not do something. And I guess maybe the clowns one is too, is like, hey kids, even if they’re a clown, they might be trying to snatch you up and put you in a van or something. So every single one of these urban legends that we just mentioned, the candyman, the babysitter with the man upstairs, the clown, and then the phantom killer slash hook thing, every one of those is based on real murders that happened, but it were like a one time isolated event.

And then these urban legends make it seem like hundreds of people have succumbed to this hidden treasures and overboard moments. For me, some of the real hidden treasures was just all the interviews with the law enforcement. I didn’t expect this film to be this way because this is not. I’ve never seen this. This is my first time watching it and I didn’t know what to really expect, so I went in blind. I didn’t even know there was urban legends experts. Right? Like I don’t think there really is. I think they made that up for this, but I just never even assumed.

So I’m like, there’s just this guy that’s like knee deep in urban legends every day. I don’t know why that Just gave me such a kick where I’m like oh this guy’s like I’m an expert. Urban legends, no big deal. Like you know what I mean? Like this is his job like literally just jumping from urban legend documentary to urban legend documentary. And then I would say like you know some of the, the overboard moments, it wasn’t too much for me. I thought he did a pretty good job in this film like of trying to explore things and connect these legends with like hey this is probably where it came from.

But some of the overboard I would say would be kind of like the sensationalize of, of some of them and like the, the. The. The over dramatic like of oh like people. That’s more I guess a critique on people like than the film because I think it’s like people like it just kind of makes you analyze their thought process behind some of these urban legends. So I don’t really want to hold against the film but that would probably be my main overboard moment. But the sensational legs sensationalization of urban legends. I think the, the hidden treasure for me I guess it’s not that hidden because it’s in.

It’s the very first story that they get into which was about that phantom killer and the hook archetype and all that. Because when they go into that particular story they go in a lot of depth. They bring out the names and the dates of all these different players and the, the actual victims and actual murders. For example, that one took place in 1946 and they were called the moonlight murders in Texarkana and it was right off Highway 67 and it was where. And they don’t get into this part very much. But the very first murder was a 29 year old man with a 17 year old girl that get capped in like this car.

So like they’re not like whoa, what was going on there? Let’s, let’s dig up some dirt on this 29 year old that’s with the seven. But anyways that was the very first murder was called these moonlight murders and that as you mentioned earlier that the hook story was about. And this is where the urban legend expert comes on and he’s like well maybe there’s a little urban legend in all of us. He’s kind of doing that thing. But he mentions how the metal hook is supposed to be scary because this sharp metal hook means that you’re going to be like penetrated by some metal from a violent person.

You know, you’re actually being hurt by this metal. And that in the real original case that apparently the girl was, you know, stabbed in a very violent way with the gun and that this metal, metal thing. I mean, he’s kind of stretching it to make this point. But then they go on the show how this phantom killer that had this bag over his head turns into the movie Halloween. It turns into a movie called the Town that Dreaded sundown and in 1976, which was then remade in 2014 by Blumhouse. So again, this one actual case of, of murder with this 29 to 17 year old get taken out, turns into the hook hand archetype.

It turns into the Halloween Michael Myers archetype. It turns into all these other slasher movie things that kind of build on. And I didn’t know any of that. And it was interesting to see them draw all that together. And I guess the overboard moment or kind of like the worst part of this movie is they don’t do that. For all the other stories that come up, they mention the Candyman thing, but they don’t really get into any, any specifics beyond that one case. And then as soon as they get into the clown stuff, they just stop caring.

At that point, they kind of gave up trying to tie it to specific events. I swear, they, they bring up Bozo the Clown, they bring up Homie the Clown, right? Like what. I don’t even remember what point they were trying to make. But when they started mentioning Homie the Clown, I was like, how is this tying into any. Was, well, you know, Homie the Clown might have been by these Cabrini Green projects, which is also where Candyman came. And I love the, the schizophrenic synchronicity part of that. But in the scope of this documentary, they weren’t trying to be cool Skitso.

They were trying to tie something up that they really get to. And the biggest moment for me, and again, they kind of did this in the Slender man movie that we watched last week. But in this one they have this guy and they, they talk about, oh, dude, who was the guy that shot up the movie theater during the Batman? James Holden. Is that, was that the guy’s name? So, but they bring up James Holden and then of course the urban legend expert guy is like, well, isn’t there a killer in all of us? And it was just like, nah, bro, there’s not, there’s not a killer clown in all of us.

You can’t just take any premise and say, well, isn’t there a fill in the blank in all of us? Just to kind of sound deep as the armchair thing. So I, I really did not appreciate the tacked on version of the, the clown inclusion and all the weird stuff they were stuffing. It literally felt like someone was like, oh, we need to get another four minutes out of this in order to, to, you know, check this box, guys. So that was kind of the overboard moment for me, was just losing the thread after having started out on such a strong first step.

Ripples and waves. Now I can’t say too much how popular this, because I, we really, I think we both didn’t really know about this film. We were just trying to keep in like, you know, we like to keep in a theme and since it’s the Halloween season, we’re like, hey, well, what’s a good Halloween film? And we wanted to explore stuff and we saw this was about urban legends and it had reviews and it had some traction. It wasn’t just some like random thing that no one had seen. So it was, it’s up there. Like that’s what I was saying.

I don’t know necessarily, I don’t know. I didn’t know the significance of it, but it was actually highly rated and out there. And I, I think that it had some impact of moving through and kind of changing what documentaries are. I like the, the explorer exploring these urban legends in a different way than maybe they used to. Yeah, I think that this one probably has way less impact than the Slender man one where it was referenced in news articles and it took place during the actual time. This one is kind of just someone got interested. It’s like an Internet sleuth documentary where someone reads an article online and they’re like, oh, we can make a documentary about this.

Let’s drive to this place and just knock on doors and ask people questions. But nothing news discovered, no smoking gun or groundbreaking evidence or any of any kind is brought up. It’s kind of just like a recap, a little bit of like a mixture of different urban legends. So for that, for that purpose, I think that it serves it well. But I can’t imagine someone watching this and then being like, oh my God, this changes everything. So there’s not really like a lot of ripples and waves that come from this one. Yeah. The only other thing I think it may have inspired, I don’t know, but maybe it helped the film Slender man, because I think the Slender man film came a couple years after.

I don’t know if that was part of it, if it played any significance, but that’s just me speculating and I don’t think they even mentioned Slender man in this documentary, which is weird because that would have been a perfect example of a modern version. Because almost every other urban legend that comes up in this documentary are all from the 60s and the 70s. There’s not a single thing that’s kind of my. Even the creepy clowns. They mentioned that the very first report of this clown craze was in 1967, which predates it coming out. It predates the poltergeist coming out.

It predates any pop culture versions of scary clowns. Yet. There were these weird scary clown incidents happening all over the. The. The country and they couldn’t really explain because there was no Internet. There’s no way the kids in schools were communicating and kids in other states. So. But that was weird that all of these urban legends all were from the 60s and 70s or earlier. Definitely a miss on like the modern urban legend. It’s sinker swim time, which is got. This one’s hard, man. Like, we have to get off the fence a little bit. I’m gonna say sink, but only because it doesn’t meet, I think, what my criteria is now.

And the biggest one is like, I gotta learn something, like really cool and new. And granted, I didn’t know about the Phantom Killer and that it was sort of the lead to the hook story and that that led into Halloween and it led into all these other movies. But honestly, I feel that you. You could just watch one of those movies and probably get more of an impact and insight over what people really feel from this one. This one just kind of felt like Internet sluice. This documentary could have been a Medium article that you kind of read while you were sitting on the toilet one day.

You don’t necessarily have to sit down and watch this thing. I do recommend it if you are interested in urban legends and stuff. I absolutely think that you’ll like this and you’ll probably find it interesting. But if you’re just going up and being like, hey, recommend a documentary to me. This one’s not registering on like my top 200. I. I will give it a swim, though. I’m always on teetering on the fence. I’m gonna give it that swim. I’m gonna lean that way because for me it got me thinking a little bit differently. Now it may just because it triggered thoughts in my brain.

Like, I don’t know if it would do for everybody. I think it’s a good enough film to show somebody and I think they would be interested in it. And it’s a good watch. And for me, it just really got me thinking about this whole conspiratorial world and urban legends. And it almost got me like, hey, the Mandela effect and urban legends, how they kind of have this parallel together. But so the swim is kind of maybe only for me because I got some thoughts in my head that it triggered. So I don’t know if it necessarily.

The film is. There is definitely things that they’ve left out that they could have done a better job on. Like I wish, like you said, like they would modernize it a little bit and bring some of these more modern urban legends that they could have explored. But they, they kind of left that on the table. But I’ll give it a swim on the horizon. You know, we got next. This is. We’re going to keep it a little light for everybody because we, we don’t want to. You know, we’re kind of getting into these urban legends. Might be a little creepy to everybody.

I know it’s holiday season. I mean I keep saying holidays, but Halloween, it’s. Halloween’s a holiday. But yeah, we need, we need one that, that you can play with your kids and like everyone can have fun. We don’t want to talk about like murderers and stuff. So Faces of Death is what we chose because technically it is a documentary now. Some may label it as a what they say, not mockumentary. There was another phrase that I saw they called as like, I’ll get it for that next episode. Don’t forget to go to paranoidamerican.com kill themockingbirds.com this is Sean Chris.

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