Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Understanding Urban Legends,” an exploration of the tales we tell to terrify each other, with Cory Thomas Hutcheson, folklorist, lecturer at Middle Tennessee State University, and author of New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic.
[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]
The call is coming from inside Fait La Force! Or if it were, anyway, it would summon you to sit at one of the beloved taproom’s tables for a summertime treat: A talk about that modern folktales that get circulated around campfires, on school playgrounds, and in the dark corners of the internet.
Folklorist Cory Thomas Hutcheson, whose reputation for giving excellent talks has earned him a following among Nashville’s Profs and Pints fans, will give you a deeper understanding and appreciation of urban legends—also called contemporary legends—than you have ever had before.
You’ll recognize something hauntingly familiar as he talks about a hook-handed killer terrorizing teenage lovers out for a drive, or the person who woke up in a tub full of ice possessing one less kidney, or a shadowy figure shown by an ongoing trucker’s headlights to be in the backseat of a car.
But he’ll also lead you deeper into such lore, discussing where such tales come from and the deeper meanings that drive them and keep them alive via word-of-mouth or their online circulation on subreddits.
You’ll gain an understanding of how these stories connect to bigger issues in the culture around us.
You’ll see how anxieties about disease and contagion became stories about food contamination or about vicious ghosts wearing medical masks, and how both teen and adult fears about teens growing up too fast became tales of amorous adolescents pursued by sadistic killers.
You’ll also learn a bit about how these tales change over time with different tellings and tellers, and whether troubling facts lurk within any such fictional accounts. You'll encounter murderous bathroom ghosts, traverse the haunting liminal-space lore that inspired the new hit film Backrooms, and meet the infamous Slenderman.
Just make sure you check your backseat before you start driving home. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)