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Children's Engagement with Urban Legends

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Children's Engagement with Urban Legends Piper Biswell Temporality and Collective Story-sharing Through Horror Narratives Children’s Engagement with Urban Legends Piper Biswell Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka 1 Piper Biswell A thesis submitted to Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts in Cultural Anthropology, 2020. Cover photo: Artistic interpretation of Click Click Slide created by Haley Biswell. 2 Piper Biswell ABSTRACT This thesis explores how children engage with horror narratives in the digital era and how this engagement has changed over the last decade. The term ‘Horror narratives’ encompasses a wide range of genre-based storytelling from urban legends, to creepypastas, to images, YouTube videos, and internet forums. It is a broad form of story-sharing that transcends physical and digital mediums. I examine the relationship between the horror narratives, the individual child, and wider group engagement in real-life and on a digital platforms, and how this has changed over the last 15 years. Over the past twenty years children’s access to personal devices and digital media has expanded rapidly. I ask whether oral tradition has been overtaken by digital horror narratives. What does story-sharing look like in a digital medium? Part of this paper is looking at how children’s horror narrative repertoires develop and what stories are retained and disseminated among their peers. In my childhood era the predominant form of dissemination was oral story-sharing, but during my fieldwork with young scouts I learned that children engage in a variety of media for dissemination as they now have easier access to internet communities on their personal devices. I have compared popular oral urban legends from my childhood (Click Click Slide, Drip Drip, and “Johnny, I want my liver back”) to contemporary horror narratives children engage with both in real-life and in the digital medium. My thesis also explores the relationship between young adults in their early twenties and memories of these horror narratives from their childhood, and how these memories have been impacted by nostalgia and retroactive knowledge. The major question of this thesis is how has horror storytelling changed from my childhood fifteen years ago to present time, and what have new technologies contributed to this evolution in horror narration? 3 Piper Biswell TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................... 3 LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................... 6 GLOSSARY....................................................................................................................................... 7 Online Terms ................................................................................................................................. 7 New Zealand Terms ...................................................................................................................... 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. 8 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................................... 10 Who remembers click click slide/clickety clack? ........................................................................ 10 Research on Urban Legends ...................................................................................................... 11 Research on Folk Groups and Communities ............................................................................ 12 Research on Children’s Storytelling ......................................................................................... 13 Brian Sutton-Smith and my Research ...................................................................................... 14 Nostalgia....................................................................................................................................... 15 Thesis Outline .............................................................................................................................. 15 CHAPTER ONE: METHODS ....................................................................................................... 17 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 17 Ethnography ................................................................................................................................ 17 Autoethnography ........................................................................................................................ 19 Reflexivity .................................................................................................................................... 21 Interdisciplinary Research ......................................................................................................... 22 Choosing Participants ................................................................................................................. 24 Choosing Interview Locations .................................................................................................... 25 Entering the Field and Going ‘Home’ ....................................................................................... 26 Working with Child Participants .............................................................................................. 28 Online Surveys ............................................................................................................................ 30 Interviews ..................................................................................................................................... 32 Interview Coding ......................................................................................................................... 33 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 34 CHAPTER TWO: HORROR NARRATIVES ............................................................................. 36 What are Horror Narratives? .................................................................................................... 37 What Kind of Horror Narratives do Children Engage With? ................................................ 40 How do Children Engage Individually with Horror Narratives?........................................... 46 4 Piper Biswell How do Children Develop Repertoires? ................................................................................... 52 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER THREE: COLLECTIVE STORY-SHARING ........................................................ 56 How are Horror Narratives Disseminated? .............................................................................. 57 How are Horror Narratives Performed? .................................................................................. 62 How is Sociality Enriched Through Online Communities? .................................................... 65 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 69 CHAPTER FOUR: TEMPORALITY .......................................................................................... 71 How have Horror Narratives Evolved over Time? .................................................................. 71 Local Versus Universal Horror Narratives .............................................................................. 74 What is the Role of Nostalgia? ................................................................................................... 80 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 85 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................... 88 Final Remarks ............................................................................................................................. 90 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................... 92 5 Piper Biswell LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Table of interview participants …...……………………………………………………………………24 Figure 2 ‘Drip Drip’. Illustrated by David Chelsea (1994)………………………………………………………43 Figure 3 Posted by killerjeff on Newgrounds (2008)…………………………………………………………….44 Figure 4 Example of the NZ news media response to the Momo Challenge Hoax (The New Zealand Herald 2018)...……………………………………………………………………………………………………………44 Figure 5 Still from YouTube video of ‘Slenderman’s Daughter (PART 5)’(2019).……………………………..50 Figure 6 The first journal entry suggestions for Jeff the Killer on DeviantArt ………………………………….51 Figure 7 Jeff the Killer search results on Wattpad……………………………………………………………….51 Figure 8 Tumblr post joking about fanart of Slenderman ..................................................................................... 56 Figure 9 Original anonymous post on 4chan .......................................................................................................
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