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, check back Wednesday and Friday for more.

“We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” Not exactly a shocking twist these days. Let’s face it: the elements that make urban legends so compellingly repeatable and readymade for national ubiquity (not to mention fun) – bloodshed, panic, sexual disaster, embarrassment and grotesque coincidence – are the same things that make them so falsifiable. Only so many people’s cousin can have the same friend who got a cheek full of spider eggs, a candy apple full of razors or a snizz full of frozen hotdog before folks start wising up. The legends manage to live on because each new generation of kids represent blank slates upon which someone’s gonna scratch out a Pepsi and Pop Rocks death equation or caricature a hook-handed killer. At the same time, these legends undergo the inevitable cultural makeovers required to ensure that they neither outstay their welcomes nor develop unsightly anachronisms.

So even if the call isn’t coming from inside the house… even if there aren’t even any calls because, clearly, the babysat children’s parents, wherever they me be, are available via portable media devices… the babysitter suffers.

So we have the cash-hungry high schooler whose babysitting experience is repeatedly disrupted by the eerie presence of a life-sized clown doll that, from one fearful glance to the next, seems to slightly shift its position; when she finally calls the parents to ask if she can toss a blanket over it, they have no idea what she’s talking about. Of course, by then it’s too late.

Get the rest AFTER THE JUMP…

We have the deranged au pair with the split personality who’s ultimately revealed to be both victim and killer. (I call this the “technology vs. horse” version.)

And we have the two-for-one babysitter massacre, in which a couple friends team up and agree to split their babysitting profit, but then find themselves victims of the all-too-predictable series of threatening phone calls; while one girl stays downstairs to attend to the drawing of hearts around an 11th grader’s name, her friend goes upstairs to check on the children. By the time the downstairs sitter hears the shocking punchline from the dutiful call tracer, something is already thump, thump, thumping down the stairs. Surprise! It’s her friend, sans limbs, desperately dragging herself away from the killer and the slaughtered bodies of the children that he already murdered.

Why all the babysitter hack and slash jobs? Folklorists and feminists alike have continually asserted that these stories represent the social obligations placed upon young women, who, through seemingly innocuous babysitting jobs, are groomed for an adult life of housebound maternity. And given that the original legend first started whispering its way down the lane during the 1960s, that’s not an unreasonable interpretation. After all, conservative adults have employed fictional lover’s lane-stalking madmen to try to scare developing women out of pre-marital sex. (Though, if the prospect of an eight pound parasite shredding its way out of her snatch doesn’t stop her, a little hook murder can’t possibly make a difference.) It only follows that the equally (though understandably) extremist views of women’s libbers might create a fictional murderer to filet the possible future inhabitants of homemaker hell. And what better group to focus on than babysitters, who are not only grandmothered into a parody of adulthood via false notions of inert, maternal complacency – all soda guzzling and unsupervised television – but who are also compensated for it. (As expected, lots of feminists have voiced their approval of this urban legend, but I would’ve predicted a larger Marxist cheering section.)

I’m completely willing to accept that the urban legend of the babysitter and the man upstairs has wicked overarching feminist implications. But an insidious brainwashing by a gender-fascist patriarchy isn’t the story’s only scare factor. On a literal level, the tale exploits the simplest and most horrible fear of the babysitting profession: children in immediate, mortal danger. In a way, this makes it far more ingenious than, say, the hook-hand killer story, which weakly offers the wildest of hypothetical situations – “don’t have sex because maybe a killer will escape from a facility near the place where you’re having sex and maybe he’ll pass directly by your car and maybe, while he’s there, in the process of fleeing the law, he’ll decide to take a breather and murder you.” The babysitter story is far more clever because it takes what, to any teenage babysitter (imbued as they are with, perhaps, premature, but certainly unwieldy, adult responsibilities) is a bad situation – the children coming to harm – and amplifies it into a worst case scenario, planting new and gruesome seeds of doubt next to already flourishing mental shrubbery. Perhaps, on its own, the threat of the hidden homicidal killer isn’t enough to dissuade someone from a night of stranger-financed rugrat wrangling, but add it to the established list: house fires, accidental poisonings, choking deaths and bathtub drownings… Maybe “We’ve traced the calls! They’re coming from inside the house!” isn’t a shocking twist, but it might be enough to keep Wendy’s in fry cooks.

Wednesday – Hangin’ On The Telephone: Technology and the Babysitter Legend

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