We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.
We're allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.
I wouldn't call it ["Wild Bill Hickok"] an urban legend, but I guess I'd call it a rural legend that the cowboy was always soft-spoken, mild-spoken, well-mannered.
The idea of the chickens with the multiple breasts and thighs came from an urban legend that some fast-food places had developed chickens with four thighs. It wasn't true, but it is a suggestive rumor.
I think because it is a very well-saturated story,episode of Justified in Hannibal, and we've all heard it in some frame of a story, we've heard the urban legend of waking up in a bathtub with a kidney missing. It felt like if we are telling an organ-harvesting story, it was really about quickly selling the iconography of an organ-harvesting story, and then being able to mask that as a perfect way for Hannibal Lecter to go shopping for his menu.
I've had a lifelong obsession with urban legends and American folklore.
'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.
I’m going to check the world’s best source for spawning new urban legends, the Internet. What, you thought I couldn’t even type? The Web is just another threshold between one world and another.
I don't necessarily think stories have functions any more than diamonds have functions, or the sky has a function... Stories exist. They keep us sane, I think. We tell each other stories, we believe stories. I love watching the slow rise of the urban legend. They're the stories that we use to explain ourselves to ourselves.
The explosions, like the urban legends, are a great way of bringing people in to watch, because it's really fun, and you know we're always going to give you a satisfying ending.
or simply:
