Urban tale watch online full#

Everyone knows houses built on burial grounds are bound to be cursed, right? Although ancient Indian Burial mounds are few and far between in the USA, they sure get a lot of flack.įrom Stephen King's The Shining and Pet Cemetery to Hollywood classic Poltergeist and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the message is very clear – don't just look at a home before you buy it, look under it.

Location, location, locationĪs someone eager to get on the property ladder, I don't know how bothered I'd be to check what my house was built on, but you might want to get a surveyor to have a look. Organ harvesting is a staple of horror fiction from Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go to Neal Shusterman's excellent Unwind. The moral couldn't be clearer, really, could it?

Urban tale watch online full#

The following morning, he awakens in a bathtub full of ice to find one of his kidneys has been removed for sale on the black market. In this tale, a young man is either seduced by a beautiful woman or pays for an escort. This story was actually taken from a much earlier MR James story called 'The Diary of Mr Poynter' in which a character experiences a similar fate. Eventually, she investigates the noise only to find her dog slaughtered and a message written in blood – 'humans can lick hands too'. She is reassured by the presence of her faithful dog who licks her hand from under the bed. In this popular tale, a scared girl (or sometimes an old woman) listens to an ominous dripping coming from within her home. The Hunger Games presents kids willing to kill for a lifetime of food while Soylent Green (based on the 1966 novel Make Room, Make Room) goes one further and suggests we'll soon be eating people, much like in Matt Whyman's The Savages. While the 'shock pictures' were quickly revealed to be fakes, more than one of my Facebook friends were taken in.įoodstuffs often fall victim to urban myths – are MacDonald's burgers really made from earthworms? Will mixing popping candy and fizzy pop make you explode? Don't forget the perennial 'dog meat takeaway' rumour.įood is at the centre of our lives so it's no surprise it's at the heart of our fiction. Recently, outraged internet people were taken in by claims that popular fast food outlet KFC were breeding genetically mutated chickens for their burgers. In the original, novelised version of I Know What You Did Last Summer by Lois Duncan, the killer uses a gun but the cinematic version by Kevin Williamson features a hook-handed fishermen hell-bent on revenge. Either the couple go home to find a hook embedded in the back of the car or one of them ends up suspended above the car with his fingers scraping against the roof. The hookmanĪnother campfire must, this tale features an amorous young couple out for a drive when the radio informs them a hook-handed lunatic has escaped from a local institution.

On returning home, the victim experiences a 'hatching' whereby parasitic baby spiders and/or ants burst out from under their skin.įYI – this isn't physically possible, but it hasn't stopped parasitology being a defining feature of the body horror genre from Alien and Wrath of Kahn to Stephen King's Dreamcatcher and Stephenie Meyer's The Host. Possibly one of the more 'believed' urban myths, this one tells the tale of a young person, often a traveller to a far-flung location, who is bitten by a spider and/or an ant.

This year sees not one but two novels retelling versions of the legend: my own Say Her Name and an American version, The Summoning. The X Files and Supernatural directly tackled the Mary myth on screen. Mirrors and reflections, a regular fixture in uncanny literature play parts in Clive Barker's The Forbidden, which went on to be the film Candyman, while Ringu, by Koji Suzuki, substitutes a mirror for a television set. Some links have also been made to Queen Mary I as she suffered multiple miscarriages during her reign. This evolved into something more gory – groups invoking a bleeding spirit or witch called Mary. In the earliest versions, an unmarried woman would see the face of her future husband in the glass or a skull if she were destined to die before being wed. Perhaps the most famous modern myth, this tale suggests that if you are to look in the mirror and say 'Bloody Mary' a specified number of times, something will happen. Here I present 10 of the scariest urban legends and examine their roots and influence. My new novel, Say Her Name is my version of the most famous urban legend of them all, the 'Bloody Mary' curse.