Here are two examples of the urban legend known as
the "The Dead Boyfriend."
Example #1:
A girl and her boyfriend
are making out in his car. They had parked in the woods so no one would see
them. When they were done, the boy got out to pee and the girl waited for him
in the safety of the car.
After waiting five
minutes, the girl got out of the car to look for her boyfriend. Suddenly, she
sees a man in the shadows. Scared, she gets back in the car to drive away, when
she hears a very faint squeak... squeak... squeak...
This continued a few
seconds until the girl decided she had no choice but to drive off. She hit the
gas as hard as possible but couldn't go anywhere, because someone had tied a
rope from the bumper of the car to a nearby tree.
Well, the girl slams on
the gas again and then hears a loud scream. She gets out of the car and
realizes that her boyfriend is hanging from the tree. The squeaky noises were
his shoes slightly scraping across the top of the car!!!
Example #2:
Here's a story my mom
told to me and my friends when I was about seven years old. You can imagine I
was scared to death...
A woman and her boyfriend
were on their way home from somewhere (not important) one night, and suddenly
his car ran out of gas. It was about one in the morning and they were
completely alone in the middle of the nowhere.
The guy stepped out of
the car, saying comfortingly to his girlfriend, "Don't worry, I'll be
right back. I'm just going to go out for some help. Lock the doors,
though."
She locked the doors and
sat restlessly, waiting for her boyfriend to come back. Suddenly, she sees a
shadow fall across her lap. She looks up to see... not her boyfriend, but a
strange, crazed looking man. He is swinging something in his right hand.
He sticks his face close
to the window and slowly pulls up his right hand. In it is her boyfriend's
decapitated head, twisted horribly in pain and shock. She shuts her eyes in
horror and tries to make the image go away. When she opens her eyes, the man is
still there, grinning psychotically. He slowly lifts his left hand, and he is
holding her boyfriend's keys... to the car.
Analysis
"The Dead Boyfriend" is reminiscent
of the hook-man
urban legend, in which a pair of teenagers necking on Lovers' Lane
race off in a fright after hearing a radio alert about a murderer on the loose
with a hook for a hand. On returning home they discover, to their horror, a
bloody hook dangling from one of the car door handles.
Whereas the protagonists of "The Hook"
escape with their lives, the present tale concludes with the boyfriend murdered
and the girlfriend in fatal jeopardy (though in some variants she is ultimately
rescued by passersby). Folklorists regard both narratives as examples of cautionary
tales but tend to interpret their meanings differently.
"The Hook" is usually read as a warning against adolescent sexual
activity; "The Dead Boyfriend" has been interpreted as a more
generalized warning not to stray too far from the safety of home. "On a
literal level a story like 'The Boyfriend's Death' simply warns young people to
avoid situations in which they may be endangered," writes folklorist Jan
Harold Brunvand, "but at a more symbolic level the story reveals society's
broader fears of people, especially women and the young, being alone and among
strangers in the darkened world outside the security of their own home or
car." (The Vanishing Hitchhiker, W.W.
Norton, 1981.)
Thematically, "campfire
stories" such as these have much in common with the plot lines
of modern horror movies, but there is an important difference. Typically, the
villains in slasher films exhibit supernatural traits such as inhuman strength
and "unkillability" (e.g., Michael Myers in Halloween and
Freddie in Nightmare on Elm Street), while the hook-handed madmen
and crazed axe murderers of urban legendry are only slightly exaggerated
versions of the real-life serial killers we read about in newspaper
headlines.
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