The Best Movie Critic   +  TIME

Watch THIS Instantly: Cropsey

Justin here with a look at the excellent documentary, Cropsey, which is currently available to stream from Netflix.

When I was a kid, sometimes my mom would let me stay up and watch scary movies with her. The ones that got under my skin the most were the Freddy movies. The mix of gore and surrealism was a perfect fit for my young mind's early sorting of fact and fantasy. I was the age when the adults around me would vaguely warn me about strangers, a very practical threat. Each night though, I lived in fear of imagined monsters in my closet or lurking around my bed. When the Nightmare on Elm Street movies were at their most suspenseful, mom would yelp and grab my knee. I'd scream - and then of course giggle. It was then that I was also introduced to that horror movie mantra:

It's only a movie.
The mantra sustained me and probably even desensitized me. Supernatural horror movies don't bother me at all. I've accidentally ruined many of them for my friends by laughing when the creature finally appears. The horror movies that affect me are the ones like The Night of the Hunter. What does scare me are the things that people are actually capable of.

Cropsey hit me extra hard. It's a documentary that plays like a horror movie. And not like one of the patently phony ones like The Blair Witch Project or Cannibal Holocaust. In Cropsey, directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio revisit an urban legend from their childhood about a killer who abducted children. Those legends were based on the cases of several missing children around Staten Island and the man accused of abducting them, Andre Rand.

There was never enough evidence to convict Rand of murder, but he wasn't able to beat a kidnapping charge. Around the time that the filmmakers started investigating what happened, Rand was becoming elligible for parole. The public had decided that Rand was a menace that needed to be locked up in perpatuaity so a new trial was held about the disappearance of another young girl over twenty years prior.

Rand worked as a janitor at a cesspool of human depravity called Willowbrook. A young Geraldo Rivera did an expose on that institution, which was a sort of home for human cast-offs. In addition to a hospital for patients with incurable diseases, Willowbrook housed many developmentally disabled adults and young people. The footage of Willowbrook in its heyday is beyond appalling. The patients were not cared for and left to wallow naked in their own filth. Think Shutter Island plus Kurtz' camp in Apocalypse Now and that's still too nice of a place. After the government shut down Willowbrook, its vast facilities with a network of underground tunnels became a lair for drifters and criminals. It was here that Rand allegedly brought abducted children and murdered them.

The story of course goes much deeper and gets much weirder. To this day, no one really knows exactly what happened at Willowbrook. Rand, if nothing else, has major mental health issues. He has not given an interview to anyone and will most likely take the truth to his grave.

Cropsey is more than a story about Rand and the abductions though. The filmmakers discuss the importance of urban legend, the sometimes frustrating justice system, what “closure” means, and the relationship between the media and communities. To their credit, the directors of Cropsey don't editorialize much about Rand's innocence or guilt. There is a lot of evidence that makes Rand look like the killer, and like he definitely could have done it. However, there is also some amount of doubt.

Even though Cropsey is being sold to a lot of people as a horror-documentary hybrid, it's much closer to a straight crime documentary. There are plenty of disturbing parts in Cropsey, but there's actually very little sensationalism. Willowbrook is scary as fuck. You couldn't pay me enough to step foot inside its ruins. Simply put, Cropsey is spooky enough just covering the facts of the case and the directors' investegation. This movie isn't for everyone. If you have a morbid fascination with the dark side of human nature, then Cropsey is going to be endlessly fascinating to you. If you have a hard time with stuff like this, then stay away. Seriously.