Interview: Joshua Zeman (Cropsey)

In almost every community there is an urban legend floating around about a madman who disposes of children who aren’t careful and become too curious about their surroundings. The boogeyman himself varies from town to town – even within the community itself – but the message is always the same: travel in packs and stay away from dangerous areas….or else! For kids on Staten Island in New York, that boogeyman was known as Cropsey, an escaped mental patient who would snatch kids off the street late at night. Filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio grew up with the legend of Cropsey, but in 1987 the legend took on human form when Andre Rand, a former employee of the Willowbrook mental institute for children, was convicted of the kidnap and murder of Jennifer Schweiger, a 13-year old girl with Down Syndrome.

Zeman and Brancaccio teamed up to make the chilling documentary Cropsey, which begins with current and former residents of Staten Island – including the filmmakers – describing the creepy and varied legend of Cropsey. From there, the doc takes on an investigative journalism form, as we learn the facts in the case of Andre Rand and the disappearances of five children over the course of more than a decade. A highlight of this section is old news footage of a young Geraldo Rivera exposing the bureaucratic corruption and the mistreatment of patients at Willowbrook, with difficult to watch sequences of malnourished mentally handicapped children and the filth that they were forced to live in. This segues neatly to the directors forming their own investigation as they piece together Rand’s story and even try to line him up for an interview. Over the course of their inquiries they uncover some truly disturbing things about the community they grew up in, and that’s what makes Cropsey such a terrifying film: that much of what they thought was fake is actually real, and that maybe, just maybe, that’s the case with many of the urban legends we all grew up with.

Having played many festivals over the past 18 months, including Tribeca in New York, Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, and Sitges in Spain, Cropsey is playing limited theatrical runs across the U.S. through October and is available on Video-On-Demand through Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Brighthouse, among other cable providers, through August 12. We were able to ask co-director Joshua Zeman a couple of questions.

Jason Widgington: There are some spooky revelations about Staten Island in the film, like the existence of the underground city below the Willowbrook State School for the mentally handicapped and the rumors of Satan-worshiping in the woods around the hospital. To what extent were you aware of these things beforehand and how much of it was a surprise to you? 
Joshua Zeman: We knew the Satan-worshipping stories as kids, as well as the stories about the tunnels. Every college, mental institution, prision, they all have urban legends about tunnels, and many of them are based in reality. What we discovered was quite shocking, though. For example, the extent and size of the tunnels was shocking. They were used all the time, and they were huge. I thought it was just an urban legend, but that is something that was real. As for the devil-worshipping, I had believed it was all “Satanic Panic”, but it’s hard to cast it all as hysteria when the former head of a known cult lives in Staten Island, and the NYPD was fully investigating it.

JW: As far as documentaries go, Cropsey is a little different in that, Barbara and yourself spend a fair bit of time on camera and are integral to the goings-on onscreen. Was this your intention from the get-go or did things just work out that way?
JZ: It really wasn’t our intention, but I discovered that our connection to the legend of Cropsey was what really made the story present and real for folks. It gave the audience some identification and also helped us heighten the narrative.

JW: How far back does the legend of Cropsey go? Do you think it was created as a means for parents to instill fear and caution in kids around the area after the earlier unsolved disappearances in the 1970s of young children before they were eventually linked to Andre Rand?
JZ: The urban legend of Cropsey goes back to the 50s. It’s a cautionary tale about a bunch of campers that accidentally burnt down a cabin in the forest, killing a vacationing doctor’s wife and child. He is driven mad by the loss, and enacts revenge on the kids with an axe. It’s basically a cautionary tale to keep you from wandering too far away from the campfire and getting lost in the woods, or sneaking out of your bunk when you are at sleepaway camp. As well, there are always cautionary tales about escaped patients centering around mental instutions – those are meant to keep kids away from functioning institutions – or when those institutions are shuttered, to prevent kids from exploring the abandoned, decrepit buildings and accidentally falling through rotted floors – things like that. I can’t quite tell what was going on in Staten Island, but I like to think that the police knew about Rand but could never convict him for lack of evidence. The cops would tell their kids not to go into Willowbrook because they knew Rand was in there, and so their kids passed the story along to other kids, co-opting the story of Cropsey and incorportating the cautionary message therein.

For more information on the film, visit the website for Cropsey at www.cropseylegend.com, or watch the trailer here.