Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we pity the poor Babysitter. Monday we found out why these darlings are hunted. Come back Friday for the conclusion.

I don’t know how the story of the intercourse-interloping hook murderer plays out these days – the inset latch that adorns most modern car doors doesn’t seem especially conducive to bloody-hook dangling. Likewise, “hitchhiker” is a distinctly 20th century identifier. Vanishing or not, a trail-schlepping wayfarer with a hopefully extended thumb would confound even the hippest wagoneer or pony express messenger. So that whole police- or phone company-traced call coming from inside the house thing? Nothing to worry about, right? The legend is quarantined in the 1960s, a primitive ape of a horror story, thwacking an analog phone receiver against a monolithic switchboard to the swelling soundtrack of a droning dial tone.

Well, no. Not exactly.

It’s true that the initial story was rooted firmly in the days of land lines and ancient analog phone hook-ups, when a few patient taps to the receiver button could make intra-house Jerky Boying possible, but unlike the aforementioned door handles, which made it increasingly difficult for murderers to lose their deadly prostheses to inadvertent chastity warnings (though probably much easier for murderers to simply click open the door and bury their tines into the writhing flanks of the intertwining lovers), technology kept pace with the psychos. Despite the death of the veritable Cro-Magnon phones of the (club) swinging 60s, in-house murderers were quickly afforded new means of telephonic harassment in the form of multi-line phone systems (note that in many versions of the babysitter v. homicidal stranger story, one of said babysitter’s employers is a doctor, a fact that lends veracity to the presence of a second phone line in the house). Then, of course, everyone got cell phones, which put every babysitter (not to mention every babysitter-employing landline-reliant household) just ten digits away from the hungry fingers of the merciless sadist upstairs. Give it a few months and the stab-happy psychotics will be Skypeing their victims from portable media devices.

Do the evolution… AFTER THE JUMP

Say what you want about horror re-makes (or say nothing and feel free to leave the middle finger-assisted vitriol to me), but the two versions of “When a Stranger Calls” – the first, a loveably schlocky Carol Kane vehicle circa 1979; the second, an achingly hollow shadow thereof, produced in 2006 – demonstrate the ease with which the story can be believably transplanted into the modern milieu without sacrificing the most imperative aspects of its plausibility. Landlines to cell phones and still the babysitters remain in season.

If you’re taking this time to balk at the legal ramifications that, especially in the privatized modern age, plague the police department’s (or phone company’s) ability to perform same-night traces, understand both that the bureaucratic rigmarole is well outside the bounds of concise discussion, and that, well, it doesn’t really matter – how’d a frenzied killer manage to both retrieve his confiscated hook appendage and escape a guarded psychiatric facility? Urban legends’ cultural currency exists in wild stories told with reckless abandon… “reckless,” here, implying a certain practiced ambivalence to the laws of both man and nature (hitchhiking ghosts?).

Beyond the practicality of the telephone as medium for Nutty’s threatening monologues, there are certain related social stereotypes as well. Look no further than Milton Bradley’s 1991 board game “Electronic Talking Dream Phone” – girls love to continuously and indiscriminately spray their feelings into the talk holes on phone receivers. In this way, the killer’s use of a telephone – the very device that the babysitter was no-doubt using to learn that her secret admirer was not wearing a hat – serves as a sort of pseudo-ironic and grotesquely generalized gender comeuppance. Or so say some folklorist interpretations of the legend. It’s unclear whether these are the same folks who like to suggest that the tale plays out like a fear-inspiring intro to GRRL power posturing, in which case the phone-based antagonism serves as a warning to young girls who might be considering succumbing to the Chatty Cathy stereotype. Still, I suspect that this may just be interpretation-happy nit-pickery, as I can only see this fact being relevant if the story established that the sitter was eschewing her supervisory responsibilities in order to blab at a BFF, and I have yet to find that version (the 2006 “When a Stranger Calls” film veers perilously close – the main character is forced to take the babysitting job after she exceeds the cell minutes allotted by her parentally funded phone plan). Still, it’s worth noting that the telephone in the story can be viewed as more than a narrative means to an end. If the babysitter were a guy, I’m sure the killer would contact him through Call of Duty 4’s private chat function.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!”

I have a feeling that “house” will be replaced by either “bunker,” “tube” or “habidome” before “call” changes nomenclature.

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