Trailer
Plot summary
Michelle Mancini stops at a rundown gas station while driving back to Pendleton University, not knowing that someone is concealed in her car. The next night, campus radio host Sasha Thomas fields calls about students' sex lives, while Parker Riley entertains Natalie Simon and Brenda Bates with the tale of the Stanley Hall massacre, said to have occurred in an abandoned dormitory; journalism student Paul Gardner dismisses it as an urban legend. Word of Michelle's death spreads, but Dean Adams and campus officer Reese Wilson try to keep it quiet. Damon Brooks takes Natalie to a bluff, where an attacker in a hooded parka goes after him. Natalie runs for help, and when she returns with Reese, the car and the body are gone. Parker and Sasha tell her Damon staged a prank.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Urban Legend (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Silvio Horta developed Urban Legend's concept while working at a Nordstrom perfume counter, having just graduated from NYU film school, and pitched it in late 1997 to producer Gina Mathews, who was running writers' workshops.
- After numerous studios declined to fund the screenplay, producer Neal H. Moritz joined Gina Mathews and Michael McDonnell on the film, and in a last-ditch effort Horta brought it to Phoenix Pictures, a new company that had made only a small number of films.
- For the finale inside Stanley Hall, the production found a rundown Toronto building scheduled to be demolished and won permission to shoot there. Because the scene is set entirely at night, the crew built pipe scaffolding draped in black tarping to fake darkness.
- Tara Reid performed her own stunts during her character's chase, including the fall over the staircase landing while secured in a harness. According to Reid, the stuntman who performed the scene used a real axe throughout the filming.
- Danielle Harris, who had played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5, originally auditioned for the lead role of Natalie in Urban Legend but was cast instead as Tosh, her temperamental roommate.
SPOILER
Rebecca Gayheart, who plays Brenda, the friend revealed as the film's villain, had to "go in and fight" for the part: numerous actresses wanted it, and she read and screen-tested multiple times before producers settled on her.- Composer Christopher Young had previously played in a band with producer McDonnell in 1970s New Jersey. Although Young admired synthesizer scores such as Halloween's, director Jamie Blanks insisted he compose an orchestral score instead.
- Cinema and folklore scholars credit Urban Legend as one of the first major films to redistribute the urban legends and folklore depicted in it to the public.
