The Hook, The Hookman or Man Door Hand Hook Car Door is an urban legend about a killer with a hook for a hand attacking a couple in a parked car. The story is thought to date from at least the mid-1950s, and gained significant attention when it was reprinted in the advice column Dear Abby in 1960. It has since become a morality archetype in popular culture, and has been referenced in various horror films.
Legend
The basic premise involves a young couple cuddling in a car with the radio playing. Suddenly, a news bulletin reports that a serial killer has just escaped from a nearby institution. The killer has a hook for one of his hands. For varying reasons, they decide to leave quickly. In the end, the killer’s hook is either found hanging from the door handle or embedded into the door itself. Different variations include a scraping sound on the car door. Some versions start the same way, but have the couple spotting the killer, warning others, and then narrowly escaping with the killer holding onto the car’s roof.
In an alternate version, the couple drive through an unknown part of the country late at night and stop in the middle of the woods, because either the male has to relieve himself, or the car breaks down and the man leaves for help. While waiting for him to return, the female turns on the radio and hears the report of an escaped mental patient. She is then disturbed many times by a thumping on the roof of the car. She eventually exits and sees the escaped patient sitting on the roof, banging the male’s severed head on it. Another variation has the female seeing the male’s butchered body suspended upside down from a tree with his fingers scraping the roof. In other versions the man does return to the car only to see his date brutally murdered with a hook embedded in her. In other versions, the woman gets out of the car when her date doesn’t come back, only to see his mutilated body (either on the car’s roof, nailed on a tree, or just a few short steps way). But as she starts to panic, she runs into the maniac and she too gets killed.
There is also another legend that is similar. In the legend, the young couple are heading back from a great date but their car breaks down (either from running out of fuel or a malfunction). The man then decides to head off on foot to find someone or somewhere to help with the problem while the woman stays behind in the car. She then falls asleep while waiting and wakes up to see a hideous person looking at her through the window. Luckily the car is locked so the person can’t get inside. But to the woman’s horror, the person raises both of his arms to reveal that they are holding her date’s severed head in one hand and the car keys in the other. The fate of the woman is never revealed.
Origin
The origins of the Hook legend are not entirely known, though, according to folklorist and historian Jan Harold Brunvand, the story began to circulate some time in the 1950s in the United States. According to Brunvand in The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, the story had become widespread amongst American teenagers by 1959, and continued to expand into the 1960s.
The first known publication of the story occurred on November 8, 1960, when a reader letter telling the story was reprinted in Dear Abby, a popular advice column:
Dear Abby: If you are interested in teenagers, you will print this story. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it doesn’t matter because it served its purpose for me: A fellow and his date pulled into their favorite “lovers lane” to listen to the radio and do a little necking. The music was interrupted by an announcer who said there was an escaped convict in the area who had served time for rape and robbery. He was described as having a hook instead of a right hand. The couple become frightened and drove away. When the boy took his girl home, he went around to open the car door for her. Then he saw—a hook on the door handle! I will never park to make out as long as I live. I hope this does the same for other kids. —Jeanette
Literary scholar Christopher Pittard traces the plot dynamics of the legend to Victorian literature, particularly the 1913 horror novel The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. Though the two narratives have little in common, he notes that both are built upon a “threefold relationship of crime, dirt, and chance… Such a reading also implies a reconsideration of the historical trajectory of the urban legend, usually read as a product of postmodernist consumer culture.”
Interpretations
Folklorists have interpreted the long history of this legend in many ways. Alan Dundes’s Freudian interpretation explains the hook as a phallic symbol and its amputation as a symbolic castration.
Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg describes the story as an example of “a conflict between representatives of normal people who follow the rules of society and those who are not normal, who deviate and threaten the normal group.”
American folklorist Bill Ellis interpreted the maniac in The Hook as a moral custodian who interrupts the sexual experimentation of the young couple. He sees the Hookman’s handicap as “his own lack of sexuality” and “the threat of the Hookman is not the normal sex drive of teenagers, but the abnormal drive of some adults to keep them apart.”
Influence on film
The Hook legend has most often been depicted and referenced in horror films. Its prevalence, according to film scholar Mark Kermode, is most reflected in the slasher film, functioning as a morality archetype on youth sexuality.
In Meatballs (1979), Bill Murray’s character retells the Hook legend to campers around a campfire. He Knows You’re Alone (1980) opens with a film within a film scene in which a young couple are attacked by a killer while in a parked car. The slasher film Final Exam opens with a scene in which a couple are attacked in a parked car, and later, a student is murdered in a university locker room with a hook.
Campfire Tales (1997), an anthology horror film, opens with a segment retelling the Hook legend, set in the 1950s. I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) features a killer stalking teenagers with a hook; at the beginning of the film, the central characters recount the Hook legend around a campfire. “The Pest House” (1998), the fourteenth episode of season 2 of the TV series Millennium, opens with a murder similar to that of the urban legend. Lovers Lane (1999), is a slasher film featuring a killer who murders teenagers at a lovers’ lane with a hook. Season one, episode seven of the TV show Supernatural features a hookman as the villain.
