Future Movement Future – REJECTED

In a not-too-distant future, an anonymous researcher and their team applied for funding to develop their newest invention: a new algorithmic model for smart cameras that would allow people to analyze the movement of cars at a previously unheard-of scale. This system was said to enable new forms of predictive capabilities to emerge: the algorithm would be able to, for example, predict the route drivers wanted to take but had not yet taken—including, for example, their occult inner desires for getting away with a secret lover. A panel of academic reviewers from three different universities audited and reviewed the proposed system. All that is left are segments of the video-report resulting from this meeting, which became an urban legend among technology researchers. The short film “Future Movement Future – REJECTED” is the story of a dystopian surveillance future that was barred by institutional refusal. It importantly reminds us about how total surveillance, the “almighty algorithmic eye,” may end up seeing-predicting much less than imagining-dreaming.

Killer Portraits: An Urban Legend and Moral Panic of the 1990s

In the 1990s in Russia—as well as in other countries—there were rumors about the existence of Satanists; these sometimes lead to the so-called “Satanic Panics” described by researchers. The paper is devoted to the urban legend about Satanists that circulated in 1996–1997 in the Sverdlovsk and Moscow Regions of Russia. According to the rumors, some portraits of children taken by professional photographers included photographs of other people’s body parts, funerals, paraphernalia, and other foreign objects between the picture and its frame, which caused harm to the child depicted in the portrait. The paper is based on an analysis of the media (newspapers and a television program) and an interview taken in 2006 with a witness and participant of the events. Versions of the same urban legend published on the Internet in the 2000s–2010s are invoked for comparison. As a theoretical approach, the concept of moral panics is applied. The paper raises questions about the reasons for the explosive spread of the urban legend and the particular form of the moral panic. The paper shows that the idea of a portrait as a means of influence over the depicted person and of the possibility of damage through the image—which, in the 19th century, led to panics over the so-called “hell-depicting icons”—still exists in Russia and played its role in the moral panic of the 1990s.

An Interlude on Shots and Cultural Change

Popular culture has promoted a myth about why shot durations in movies have grown shorter during the past 50 years. The myth states that this is due to culturally shortened attention spans. There is no evidence for this urban legend. What there is strong evidence for, however, is people’s increased ability to extract visual information from displays of all kinds. IQs have increased throughout the world for at least a century, and the greatest increases have occurred for visual thinking and reasoning. This is called the Flynn effect. If people can discern images faster, filmmakers should have shortened shots. Moreover, the cultural adaptation to watching edited video invokes a concept from Michael Baxandall—the period eye. Imported to movies, viewers today are better able to see and discern visual information compared with viewers of a previous era. Examples are discussed from computer graphics.

On the emergence of the Yakut scare story as the genre of modern folklore

This article examines the emergence and essence of the Yakut scare story. The modern Yakut scare story takes roots from the traditional culture, but in its genre form represents the modern urban legend. The goal of this research lies in tracing the process of synthesis from the perspective of anthropology. The author analyzes the differences between the Yakut, Soviet and Russian scary motifs, as well as determines the key traditional sources of the emergence of the Yakut scare story. The author aims to examine scare story as an important part of modern ethnic culture that retained traditional images, as a result of transition from the traditional life to an industrial society, rather analyzing separate stories through the prism of folklore studies. This defines the scientific novelty of this paper, as this topic has not previously become a separate subject of research in the scientific literature. The sources for this article employ the theoretical works about the Yakut culture, folklore overall, as well as Russian and Soviet horror stories; field materials acquired by the author, such as excerpts from interviews and sociological survey. The conclusion is made that the modern Yakut scare story has emerged in 1970s on the basis of traditional folklore, which obtains the features of the Soviet scare story and forms the new genre of modern folk art.

The Heroic Archetypes and the Reinvention of Aswang Character in Segundo Matias’ Moymoy Lulumboy Ang Batang Aswang

Marginalized and queer heroes are being recognized in the resurgence of various types of characters in contemporary hero narratives. In challenging the normative conventions, there are heroic values in the ambiguous presentation of their character which are revived and valorized based on the heroic archetypes presented in the story. Given this, how do we reconcile the normative conventions of hero attributed to queer and deviant representation of his character and heroic deeds? This paper analyzes the contemporary work of Segundo Matias' Moymoy Lulumboy: Ang Batang Aswang. Patterned from Joseph Campbell's normative structure of hero's journey, which models the representation of various nature of character heroes and their established heroic archetypes, this study revealed that a category of heroic deviant exists in portraying character hero in the revival of Aswang lore in contemporary urban legend. Furthermore, this paper affirms that the resurrection of the archetypal pattern and the marginal presentation of the hero and his journey present a re-inscripted image of Aswang from a "rigidly static" to a semi-heroic ascension.

Urban Folklore, Urban Legend

Everyday talk is central to how places become stigmatized and how asymmetric borders enter the popular imagination. This chapter explores the tales about Tijuana that proliferate in neighboring San Diego, based on a set of forty-five qualitative interviews conducted in six San Diego County communities between 2006 and 2008. The analysis finds that people seldom repeated positive stories they heard, whereas they traded liberally in negative tales, many of which came from remote or untraceable sources. These latter stories constituted a kind of urban folklore that cast the neighboring city in a dark light. This tendency was much stronger among those who had little firsthand experience in Tijuana, revealing the reach and importance of an abstract bordered imaginary.