“If you have a bad idea in your head, you can go there and do it...”

This line of dialogue about Staten Island, the least populated of New York City’s five boroughs, seems like a bit of hyperbole when it’s delivered, but then Cropsey goes about proving it so in stunning fashion. The doc’s tag line, “What if your urban legends were real?,” is equally ambitious in its ominousness, but there Cropsey only partly keeps the promise it makes: the movie quickly leaves the somewhat generic legend behind for a more compelling true-crime emphasis, with only the thinnest of connective tissue between the two. Still, that connection, more thematic than actual, is a sufficiently strong springboard to launch one of the most involving tales of murder, madness, and mystery that I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Taking its title from a child-killer whispered about ‘round campfires up and down the length of the Hudson Valley, Cropsey is one of those rare docs that doesn’t just educate you, it actually makes you look at the world differently—which in this case might not be such a good idea. That’s because its core sociological (anthropological?) conceit seems more the stuff of the Victorian era, not America in the latter half of the twentieth century: a specific region where a major metropolis exiles and isolates (represses?) elements that it doesn’t want to see the light of day. And since the metropolis in question is New York, by implication we’re dealing with the “unwanted” of the modern world itself. One example is the Fresh Kills landfill, rumored to be visible from outer space, and evidence that the rest of the city literally “dumps” on Staten Island. Another example is the Willowbrook State School, the notorious institution for the developmentally challenged whose depraved conditions a young Geraldo Rivera became famous for exposing.

But who later returned to the forested grounds of Willowbrook after it closed down? Former patients? Former employees? The answer is, both… and that’s the premise that co-directors Barbara Brancaccio and Josh Zeman start from in their engrossing film. Think of it as investigating reporting with the creepiness factor dialed way up. Indeed, a lot of horror movies try for the look that Cropsey actually achieves: period photos of law enforcement searching for bodies, vintage newspaper headlines about disappearances, and, in the most frightening moments I’ve spent in a theater in years, a first-person shot of mysterious figures approaching silently out of the dark, nighttime woods.

Of course enjoying Cropsey for all its eerie wonder is problematic in the same way that enjoying based-on-true-events horror flicks is: at a certain point the comfort of the imaginary is no longer a refuge for the audience’s conscience. So yes, we enjoy breathing in the air of the truly sinister, but then it’s interrupted by the painful realization that real kids went missing, that real families grieved and continue to suffer to this day. Fortunately, Cropsey is a good enough movie that it transcends any exploitative feelings that might arise—by evoking true horror, true heartbreak, not the kind that you can hide a faint smile behind, it does the important job that only very artful truth-telling is capable of doing.

After several children go missing over a fifteen-year span beginning in the early ‘70s, a suspect is brought into custody, Andre Rand, whose literally drooling appearance seems to signal “case closed.” In addition, the body of Jennifer Schweiger, a thirteen-year-old with Down syndrome, is found near his al fresco sleeping quarters in the woods. On the other hand, it’s discovered after the area had already been combed once and, moreover, after Rand had been identified as a suspect… so is this an instance of a simple frame-up? And what of all the rumors of Satanic cults operating on Staten Island that require human sacrifices—was Rand possibly doing their dirty work for them? (Oddly, although it raises many questions about Rand, including whether he had accomplices, the film does not directly address the fact that after Rand’s imprisonment, the disappearances stopped.)

In the end, Cropsey suggests more than it reveals conclusively, which may make it frustrating for whodunit fans who need the closure of a TV cop drama. But Zeman, who wrote as well narrates the script, is careful to position the film as an exploration of the phenomena of urban legends more broadly… so that all the questions we’re left with merely serve to heighten the grander sense of mystery that the film is all about.

(Watch a clip from Cropsey here.)