What kind of maniac would kidnap children, chop them up and bury their remains? Cropsey, a horrific documentary, explores the evidence relating to four missing children who lived on Staten Island in the 1980s. It also investigates the urban legend behind “Cropsey” and the case against Andre Rand, the chief suspect in these crimes. Not for the squeamish, this involving film draws you into a highly disturbing real world, but once you start watching it, you can’t turn away from the screen for one minute.     

Filmmakers Joshua Zeman (The Station Agent) and Barbara Brancaccio, who both grew up on Staten Island, were quite familiar with tales about Cropsey. For them, he was an escaped mental patient who lived in an old abandoned mental institution of the area. According to legend, he would come out at night to snatch children. Various descriptions abounded. Did he have a hook for a hand? Did he use a bloody axe for his weapon? Was he real or simply an urban legend? When a 13-year-old girl actually disappeared from the area in 1987, Cropsey began to seem more like a person than a cautionary boogeyman tale told to kids to make them behave.  

I don't think Zeman and Brancaccio, as adults, could've picked a more dramatic film to collaborate on than this impressive documentary about the missing children from their old New York neighborhood and the real-life man accused of their vicious murders. Describing their first trip back to Willowbrook (the aforementioned abandoned mental institution) in twenty years, Zeman says, “We found that once familiar path to the center of the woods. Discarded hospital trays, broken dolls and rusted tricycles lie among the leaves, strewn alongside boarded up buildings. Nothing had changed except for us -- now we had the impetus to help unearth not one, but four missing children.”

In the process of trying to solve this compelling mystery, Zeman and Brancaccio have created an eerily atmospheric documentary -- one that may continue to haunt you long after seeing it.      

Shown successfully at numerous film festivals and on various theater screens nationwide, this critically acclaimed horror documentary will be available on DVD beginning May 10, 2011.  

(Released by Cinema Purgatorio; not rated by MPAA.)