Written by: Jase Marsiglia
Already fighting a stigma for its large garbage dump and being isolated enough from the bigger cities for the mob to dispose of bodies, Staten Island has grown exponentially as one of New York’s five boroughs, even if its population is still small. Small and quiet enough for citizens to notice when things become off-center. A long stretch of forest on Staten Island known as the Greenbelt housed a tuberculosis ward named Seaview Hospital, a long-abandoned structure that stood alone in the woods, covered in graffiti, half-crumbling, and overgrown.
Neighborhood kids would often explore the ruins of this building for a thrill, often unaware and uncaring, as we so often were, of the inherent dangers of abandoned structures like this. At least, until the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Schweiger in the summer of 1987. Cropsey, a shorthand name for a Staten Island boogeyman, likely derived from early 80s horror films like "The Burning" or "Madman", is a haunting, detailed documentary not only about the horrors of that summer in 1987 and the arrest of Andre Rand, aka “The Pied Piper of Staten Island,” a local pedophile and child murderer, but also about the infamous Willowbrook Children’s Hospital and its horrendous history of neglect, abuse, and experimentation. All of this coalesced into a complex urban legend that haunted Staten Island for decades. The arrest of Rand was just the beginning, however.
Cropsey (2009)
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
The disappearance and murder of Jennifer Schweiger merely opened the floodgates to a larger, more terrifying history of missing children in the area that only fueled the urban legend surrounding Cropsey, a drooling killer who lurked in the dense foliage of the Greenbelt, snatching kids who went outside to play and never came home. What filmmakers Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio uncover in this disturbing documentary is more than a look back at a horrendous series of crimes and the peculiar, dangerous man behind them. It is a web of terrifying stories involving the dark tunnels beneath Willowbrook, alleged ties to Satanic cults, a grim culture of abandonment toward children with profound disabilities, and a system that not only wasn’t equipped to care for them, but instead housed them in a “dumping site” called Willowbrook to keep them out of sight and out of mind.
Cropsey also examines a frightening community “hive mind” of sorts, where Zeman and Brancaccio uncover the very real and very dangerous culture of perception. A community will rally around the belief that the monster arrested for a crime is enough to throw a blanket over a raging inferno of questions in the pursuit of closure. Did Rand commit all of the child murders in the Greenbelt? Or, in one particularly disturbing revelation, is he simply the poster child, the “martyr” for all the dead children in Staten Island, for parents who desperately need closure in believing the person responsible is facing justice? Even if he was guilty of egregious crimes against some children, should he be held responsible for all of them, particularly if others were involved and never brought to justice? Are your children really any safer with Rand off the streets if he was simply part of a larger network of predators and killers? Some claimed Rand targeted children with disabilities, believing he was sparing parents from a lifetime of care. Others pointed to his time at Willowbrook and its horrific conditions as a breaking point. Still, many argue that the evidence against Rand is entirely circumstantial, with no physical proof linking him to several of the victims, some of whom are believed to still lie buried within the Greenbelt.
Zeman and Brancaccio offer no clear answers by the end of Cropsey, which, frankly, is the point of most urban legends. The truth lingers somewhere in the fog, but the myth is often “good enough,” even when it has no place in a courtroom. That may be the most terrifying aspect of all.
HOME VIDEO
So far, the only release for "Cropsey" has been a DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures, but it includes a decent array of extras:
• Audio commentary by directors Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman
• Deleted scenes
• Theatrical trailer
• Teaser trailers
The only thing missing that could have enhanced the set would be photo galleries of news articles surrounding the case and, if rights permitted, the original exposé filmed by Geraldo Rivera in 1972 on the deplorable conditions at Willowbrook State School, which served as a backdrop for many of the urban legends tied to "Cropsey."
BITS ‘N’ PIECES
Traum-A-Meter:
1 out of 4.
It’s not a horror film in the traditional sense, and there’s little to no gore, but the subject matter is deeply disturbing.
Today’s Jam: The weekend "Cropsey" opened in theaters, 311’s “Hey You” was at the top of the rock charts.
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