In a book written by urban legend specialist Jan Brunvand, “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” there is a trilling chapter about the theme of contamination in different urban legends. Whether it is about food or body contamination, those legends of contagion have been in place for quite some time, but not always exactly in the same form. The way those legends are infiltrated in our culture can tell us a lot about their importance and their evolution. The two legends “Alligators in the sewers” and “Spider in the hairdo” survived because of how they were portrayed in both cinema and music.
Evolution of medium in culture The two legends of contamination’s survival were possible because of the evolution of their medium of transmission in culture over time. When legends like “The Alligator in the Sewers” and “Spider in the Hairdo” started to make their permanent mark in culture, they were mostly represented in oral traditions and common literature. The first one is about baby alligators who get flushed down a toilet and now live in the sewers, and the second one is about a girl with spiders growing in her unwashed hair.
We have always had a concern about contamination. During the late Victorian era, people were so obsessed with purity and contamination that there was signs of that concern in advertisement against contamination and in religious stories focused on the purging of the sins and the importance of the body and mind purity (Pittard). For example, when the investigation for Jack the Ripper murders, people started telling all sorts of stories, legends and parodies to enforce those values on society (Pittard).
As medievalist Shirley Marchalonis recalls,”cleanliness has replaced godliness as the operative force” (Brunvand, 78). During medieval times, being clean and pure was so important that there were similar legends of “Spider in the Hairdo” about proud ladies trying to meet the beauty standards at the time (Brunvand, 78). Later on, the alligators’ legend moved on to be portrayed in real newspaper, like Brunvand brought up with an article about “Alligators in New York City” (Brunvand, 96). At the time, the urban legend was treated as a “true” story by journalist.
After society continued to grow and became more sophisticated, the contamination urban legends moved into children’s books. Children’s books being more subjects of fantasies and storytelling, this shift indicates the changing view of legends more as stories than as facts. There were indeed traces of the “Alligators in the sewers” legend in Peter Lippman’s The great escape and in The Sewer Story, both published in 1973. In those two books, the celebration of the return of the New York City alligators to Florida is characterized by them dressing as tourists and going back tot he jungle (Brunvand, 98).
We can see clearly with Lippman’s tales made for children the general fascination of society for what is hiding in the sewers of big cities. Since nowadays most large-scale communication is done by social media and the internet, urban legends were able to survive by adapting to the new era of technology to stay accessible and therefore useful to people. We can see that urban legends like contamination’s ones have been a recurrent theme in a lot movies and music in the last 40 years, especially in horror movies.
Particularly, “The alligators in the Sewers” has been used in the 1980’s movie Alligator and in the Radiohead song Fog, whereas “The Spider in the Hairdo” has been an inspiration for an episode of Freaky Stories in 1997 (“Alligator”; “Freaky Stories”; “Fog-Radiohead”). Differences of legends’ elements in culture The movie Alligator, the show Freaky Stories and the song Fog are all part of our culture, but differ in some ways from the typical orally transmitted versions of the two legends that Brunvand talked about.
First, the Alligator movie has some differences with “The Alligators in the Sewers” basic story, like the way developed in the sewers. In the movie, the alligator ate laboratory rats, who are also recurrent animals used in contamination legends, who had been previously injected with growth hormones, and therefore becomes humongous (“Alligator”). This is quite different form the urban legend we are used to, and this can be explained by the simple reason that the movie was supposed to be scary and needed that creepiness, that sense of danger.
Also, the alligator does something that alligators usually do not do in the oral version of the legend; it comes out of the sewers to attack people ferociously (“Alligator”; Brunvand, 90-98). Moreover, the urban legend is also presented differently in the Radiohead song Fog. The song uses the alligators’ legend to represent the loneliness of a boy, who seems to be reflecting on the bad choices he made in life, with lyrics like “He will never leave” and “How did you go bad? ” (“FogRadiohead”).
The lonely alligators who are rejected from the mainstream society for bad choices that other people made for them, like their previous owners who threw them away. The little boy “grow up fast” like the alligators, but does not have a place in society. As for “The Spider in the hairdo,” the way it was portrayed in the short television show Freaky Stories differs from the typical legend because it tells much more details about the girl; she was pretty, popular, a teenager in senior year at Small Town High who wanted to be crowned prom queen.
She was named Cindy and fell to the floor while performing her prom queen speech (“Freaky Stories”). However, some elements were consistent with Brunvand’s description of the legend, like the fact that she never washed her hair and put all sorts of chemical in it, how she had pulsing headaches and how the doctors removed the hairdo by surgery (“Freaky Stories”; Brunvand, 76-80). Do these changes have anything to do with the sexualisation of women? It is hard to be sure of those things when culture is such an integrated element of our lives.
The way contamination urban legends are different in culture and adapted to society’s interest is why both “The Spider in the Hairdo” and “The Alligators in the Sewers” were able to stay in the picture today. They needed to change certain elements for it to be appealing to the general public when put in movies and in songs. As people evolved, our values and norms changed which influenced the way the legends are presented in culture. For example, snobby Cindy in Freaky Stories whose dream is to be prom queen is a reflection of typical rich American teenager presented in teen movies nowadays.
Social importance of contamination legends in culture Contamination in general seems to be a recurrent social concern, since it has been represented in culture for centuries. The fact that “Alligator in the Sewer” and “Spider in the hairdo” survived in culture can give an insight on the importance of those urban legends for people. Since the horrific times of epidemics, contamination and medical concerns have always been present and the presence of urban legends in culture is a way to propagate the general anxiety (Brunvand).
Art forms in general such as music are kind of doing the same process of contamination, by getting songs stuck in one’s head over and over again. By propagating, music spreads moral messages, sometimes using urban legends. According to researcher lan Inglis, one of the reasons why urban legends are so present in music is because of their vagueness of them allows the musicians to really appropriate the legends for themselves and add details depending on their intentions.
Having urban legends in music has some specific social functions, which are the reasons why they still are in the picture today. First, they are indeed conversational topics to assist and maintain social relationships. Connecting urban legends to music allows further social interactions and is a popular subject of discussion. Second, they can be considered as modern variants of deeper often religious myths about legendary places, people, texts such as Jesus Christ, Atlantis, Camelot, Siddartha Gautama, and more.
Third, they allow the public to identify to protagonist and their lifestyle. The general public can live through the protagonist and experience outside situations that are unlikely to happen in their own life. Fourth, they perform all sorts of important political functions such as portraying ideologies that might be shared by the population but that contradicts the government in place. Finally, music offers themselves for interpretation, anyone can find what they need in them.
Like with the “Alligators in the Sewers” legend in Fog, one can interpret the lyrics as it pleases according to their own experiences; they might see themselves in the lonely boy rejected from society. Some of the above social functions of urban legends in music can be applied to cinema as well. Just like music, cinema is a way to entertain and engage in some reflections of our own lives by making connections between what we experience and what the urban legends shown in cinema can tell us about ourselves (Inglis).
With television shows like Freaky Stories, we get to be entertained by legends like “Spider in the Hairdo” and can recognize society’s struggles, with the overwhelming standards of beauty for example. The reason why contamination legends are still present in our culture today is due to how emotionally connected society feels toward them. We might see ourselves in the main character, in their struggle, or might just be fascinated by those odd stories supposedly true. The above social functions act mostly unconsciously, as part of our everyday life.
In conclusion, the evolution of the medium of transmission used in culture, the useful differences from oral versions of the contamination legends to cinema and music, and the social functions of legends in culture are reasons why both cinema and music allowed “Alligators in the Sewers” and “Spider in the Hairdo” to survive over time. I can not guarantee that these two legends will stay the same in the future in the way we will perceive them in culture, because culture is always changing. We need it to change to survive, otherwise we would never get better as a society, right?