Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Convicted Killer Andre Rand
Directed By:
Joshua Zeman
Barbara Brancaccio
Pin this viewing on research and mood setting for my novel. Cropsey is the most intellectually challenging thing I've watched in a while. It's a documentary set on exploring the urban legend of Cropsey, a bonfire boogeyman tale that Staten Island kids used to tell each other at summer camp. The mental institution nearby made good setting for this sort of folklore. When kids started disappearing, the legend of Cropsey took a life of it's own. And when Andre Rand has been arrested for the murder of young Jennifer, things started getting surreal.
When Rand gets caught in 1987, the evidence is circumstantial at best. Sure, he's a scary character. He drifted around the mental hospital, slept in the woods and it's never made clear if he was a patient or a worker around there. From the arrest footage displayed, he sure didn't look well and functional enough to have done this, but hey, who knows? Jennifer's body is finally found in a shallow grave, but it's still not enough Rand is condemned to a 25 to life sentence for Kidnapping only (curiously enough it's an accusation there was even less evidence on). The nightmare of Staten Island is then locked up and the population could sleep again.
So far, the only problem I have with this is that the question of a psychological evaluation never was even raised. The man was found drifting around a godforsaken institution, doesn't seem good himself, I mean, it's safe to assume he had a problem upstairs right? But the population of Staten Island didn't stop there. From his condemnation, they started trying to pin every child abduction in the region on Rand. There's been quite a lot in the region from the moment the mental institution opened. In most cases, there are zero evidence. No body, nothing, but the testimonies of alcoholic and drugs addicts, who claimed to have a moment of clarity when it happened. Andre Rand got a second condemnation from this and will most likely die in prison.
Maybe Rand is a killer, hell, maybe he did it all. But pinning every single murder on him and demonizing him as an all-evil boogeyman is avoiding the problem. In the days where the disappearances happened, Staten Island was in really bad shape. It was a dump for all sorts of problems in New York. Filth, junk and people who were not wanted anymore all ended up dying on the island. There were at least two hundred Andre Rands on Staten Island. Mental institution patients, left on their own. I think that if any of those patients committed the deeds, the population of New York needs to look at themselves and look at the way they've been taking care of the mentally diseased. Send kids into crowds of dangerous and unstable people and it's sure they will start to disappear.
Maybe he murdered, maybe he didn't, but Andre Rand will forever be the scapegoat of Staten Island. And the very people who helped creating him, by shoving him in this wasteland and forgetting about his existence, are the same people who pin every ill of mankind on him. Killer, Satanist, pervert...Cropsey. Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio pieced up together a disturbing piece of documentary, which exposes the complex mechanism through which an urban legend is born. Cropsey is amazing, watch it and gear up for a week's worth of nightmares.
SCORE: 97%
