Cinematic Ritual: Staring Girl on the Subway

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Sometimes cinema and reality interweave in the strangest of ways. Have you ever heard the urban legend of the staring girl on the subway? Here is one account:





A woman was sitting on the subway late one night and she noticed that the woman sitting across from her was staring intently at her. She pretended not to notice but each time she glanced at the woman the staring continued. At one of the stops a new passenger got on and sat next to her. After a couple of minutes he quietly told her he thought she should get off at the next stop. Knowing the next stop was a busy one, she agreed. When the next stop came up, she left the train with the man. The man said to her, “Thank God, I didn’t mean to scare you but I had to get you off that train, the woman sitting opposite you was dead and the two men either side were propping her up”.

Snopes, the internet’s encyclopediac authority on all things urban legend, has a particularly thorough page on this myth. Like many urban myths, the story about the staring girl on the train has done the rounds over the years and varies depending on time and place. But of all contemporary mythology, the tale of the staring girl could well be one of the oldest. The earliest recorded publication of this story is in a 1947 book by David J. Jacobsen called The Affairs of Dame Rumor:

There is one wondrous rumor that periodically plagues New York City newspapermen. It is known as the Dead-Man-in-the-Subway tale, a story about an unfortunate fellow whose corpse is always sitting upright in a train and whose expressionless eyes are always focused fixedly on a woman passenger across the aisle. As the train races from station to station, the woman of the rumor becomes increasingly annoyed by the brazen stare. Finally she rushes over and smartly slaps the cadaver’s face. With this, the dead man rolls out of the seat and onto the floor; quite naturally as a terrific shock to all. To those whom the rumor places directly in the subway car at the alleged time and to those people who experience the horror of the incident via the whisper.

By now you’re probably wondering what, if anything, this urban myth has to do with film. Some four years prior to the publication of Jacobsen’s book, b-movie producer Val Lewton released one of his strangest films, The Seventh Victim. Studio RKO would hand him ludicrously trashy titles such as Ghost Ship, The Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, but instead producing typical b-movie fares, he and his creative team released a series of dark, deeply philosophical films that paved the way for what we today know as the psychological horror genre.

The Seventh Seal film deals with an underworld of satanists, death and decay, however in the most ambiguous of ways, obviously to appease the censors of the time. There are a lot of characters and the plot unravels in ways that don’t entirely make sense. Unlike other, more tautly written films from the era, such as Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, The Seventh Seal fails to make use of innuendo or subtext to really drive its central themes home. That said, with everything so terribly vague and disjointed, the film becomes a rather surreal viewing experience. There’s a suicide, a general morbid fascination with death, homosexual undercurrents and apparently the film could just well be the only Hollywood production of the era to feature a score that ends on a minor key.



If all this isn’t sounding dark enough for you, then consider one of the film’s strangest moments: a vaguely familiar scene that takes place aboard a subway carriage. Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is on the run from a secret cult. Riding the subway, she sees two men carry on what appears to be a drunk friend. As the journey progresses, the drunk man’s hat topples off, revealing him to be Irving August (Lou Lubin), a private detective who was aiding the search for Mary’s sister. Alarmed and afraid, Mary flees to the next carriage in search for the help. By the time she brings the conductor back to the carriage, the men are gone.

Is this scene the genesis of the staring girl urban myth? Or did screenwriters Dewitt Bodeen and Charles O'Neal themselves once hear this creepy tale and use it as inspiration for their writings? Whatever the answer, this mystery remains a testament to The Seventh Victim's place as one of the weirdest films ever to be released by a Hollywood studio.



[ FEB, 2014 ]

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