Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends

Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends. By MikelJ. Koven. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. ix +199 pp.

Films offer excellent opportunities to demonstrate the legend's dynamics. I have shown The Burning (1981), Urban Legend (1998), and other films to my students, explaining how they reflect and encourage the spread of traditional narratives. Until now, there has been no textbook that covers convergences of legends with film. Mikel Koven's Film, Folkore, and Urban Legends fills that gap, explaining complex interrelationships with thoroughness, insight, and wit.

This book brings together revised versions of Koven's previously published essays on folklore and film, with the purpose of examining the relationship between traditional folklore and popular culture. The author explains that this is not meant to be a "definitive" study of folklore and film; instead, it strives to apply folkloristic terms to film analysis, redefining for folklore studies "what and how we can engage within popular film and television debates" (ix). He succeeds in this endeavor, explicating aspects of methodology, belief, and ostension that concern legend scholars and other folklorists.

In his introductory chapter, Koven summarizes questions raised in earlier scholarship. Do mass-mediated texts qualify as folklore? How do massmediated texts influence traditional storytelling style and content? Citing S. Elizabeth Bird's For Enquiring Minds (1992), he suggests that we focus on how "certain popular culture forms succeed because they act like folklore" (345). He decries "motif spotting" and tale-type identification, which connect films' traditional content to myth, Märchen, and legend, because these methods seem too superficial.

Part 2, "In Search of a...