Blog-o-ween 2023: "The Hook"

Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome to LARPing Real Life’s Blog-o-ween 2023! Glad you could make it, even after listening to yesterday’s prologue —— BBC Four’s adaptation of Stephen King’s ’Salem’s Lot. It was pretty good, right? Pretty scary, too, huh? Well for Blog-o-ween’s first official entry, you should probably double-knot the laces of your shoes, because this one is going to knock your socks off! Let’s begin this year’s Blog-o-ween by celebrating one of the simplest, most direct, most effective horror stories ever told: “The Tale of the Hook.”

“The Hook,” or “The Hookman” is an urban legend, one of those stories passed from person to person, usually beginning with the words “What I’m about to tell you really happened, and it happened not far from here...” You know, the kind of story whose details slightly shift depending on who is telling it. A story that is told around a campfire or in a darkened bedroom during a sleepover, preferably with a lit flashlight held below the chin. Stephen King, in his 1981 history of horror Danse Macabre, called this tale “the most basic horror story I know,” and my rendition of it goes something like this:

This guy and girl are out on a date. They drive out to Lover’s Lane and start to cuddle and kiss. The guy has the radio on so’s they can listen to romantic music while they make-out. Suddenly, the radio announcer breaks into the broadcast and says that an insane killer has escaped from the local sanitarium and was last seen heading south. Towards the Lover’s Lane area, natch. The announcer says to be on the look-out for a man who stands well over six feet, weighs over 250 pounds, and has a sharpened hook instead of a right hand.

The girl gets scared, but the guy says not to worry. They go back to necking, but the girl hears something outside. Something like the branches of the underbrush being moved around. She wants to leave. There’s nothing out there, the guy says, and they start smooching again. The girl breaks it off. This time she says she hears the sound of sticks snapping under foot. Can’t we go, she asks the guy. The guy says it was nothing, and besides, if it was anything, he’d protect her, wouldn’t he? So they start kissing again. And then the girl stops again, because this time she says she’s heard something scratching against her door. She demands to be taken home.

The guy is fed up by this point. He starts the car, slams it into reverse, and then peels out, driving off like a drag racer. They get to the girl’s house. The guy goes around the car to open her door. He turns white as a sheet and faints dead away. The girl gets out of the car to see if the guy is all right. When she closes her door, she hears something thud against the side of the car. When she looks back, she sees hanging there on the handle of the door a bloody hook!

That’s just sheer perfection, is it not? I told that story just off the top of my head. I think I hit all the necessary plot points. Maybe you’ve heard the story, too? Heard it in a different way, perhaps, with different details, but essentially the same in its shape. As King says,

“The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit...No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down.”

What other reason do you need, really?

Jan Harold Brunvand collected “The Tale of the Hook” in his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. One of the sources of the urban legend, Brunvand discovered, was a letter published on Tuesday, November 8, 1960, in a nationally syndicated newspaper column by Abigail Van Buren, better known as Dear Abby.

In said letter, a young woman tells an even more abbreviated version of the story. The young woman starts her tale by saying “I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it doesn’t matter because it served its purpose for me.” and ends it with “I don’t think I will ever park to make out as long as I live. I hope this does the same for other kids.” Brunvand goes on to trace the story back further, into the 1950s, to the post-war years when the Baby Boomers were just hitting adolescence, as well as the road. With their newfound mobility and freedom, kids headed off to out of the way places like their local Lover’s Lane and the local drive-in movie theater in their cars. “The Tale of the Hook,” then, as the young woman points out in her letter to Dear Abby, served as a way to scare those kids straight. You want go off alone and make whoopee in the back seat of your car? Fine, go right ahead, but be warned there’s an escaped maniac out there just look for an easy kill!

Also in 1981 (What is it with that year? Why so many discussions about spooky stories?), folklorist Alvin Schwartz included the story in his groundbreaking collection of oral tales for kids, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Accompanied by some of the most disturbing illustrations ever set down on paper by Stephen Gammell, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark helped take the “sleep” out of sleepovers for an entire generation of kids.

(We will be coming back to Schwartz and his collection of oral tales and legends later in the month. Be on the lookout for stories like “The White Satin Evening Gown” and that classic “The Babysitter.”)

One of my favorite renditions of “The Hook” is from the 1979 summer camp film Meatballs. In it, Bill Murray plays head counselor Tripper who has a gaggle of wet-behind-the-ears CITs (Counselors-In-Training) out on a weekend camping trip. Around the campfire, Tripper shares the story of “The Hook,” and you gotta admit...it's a doozy:

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at a short story by Robert Bloch. Until then...pleasant dreams...hmmm? Heh-heh-heh!