We’ve all heard the story, and whenever you start telling it in a group of friends there’s going to be someone that’s knows someone whose friend swears it happened. There’s a couple that are driving around, trying to find that nice, secluded spot where they can just be with each other, and maybe more. No distractions and no prying eyes. They start kissing, getting hot and heavy, and a special report comes on over the news. A lunatic has escaped from a local asylum and all persons are asked to stay safe indoors. The maniac has a hook for a hand, and it’s intimated that he’ll use it as a weapon. The girl is freaked out by this, and though her beau tries to keep going the mood is broken. He angrily pulls out at full speed and drives her home. When he opens his door and comes around to let her out, he sees that there is a bloody hook dangling from the car door and he screams.
Now despite real murders that have happened at Lovers Lane and Makeout Point, the myth of the hook is not based off of a real psycho killer. It’s something even scarier; fully realized teenage sexuality despite all of the censorship in the classroom and the carefully controlled, abstinence only sex education. The hook represents crazed teenaged hormones, and his hand is a phallic symbol that’s been curved and sharpened to a killing point. Pre-marital sex was death to your youth and innocence, despite benefits of safe and consentual sex. Also, keeping in mind that this message got started during the Red Scare that was still ongoing towards the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the hook is often portrayed looking like a Soviet sickle. It was thought that ideas like communism, and its elimination of religion and morality, would destroy the youth’s upstanding honor and American traditions.
Of course there’s even a moral to this unhappy fairy tale. Though sexually frustrated and upset, the boy realizes that if his girl had let him have sex with her that the maniac would have killed them both. Thus it shows that it is a woman’s responsibility to take the reins of sexual behavior firmly in hand, and that men should always bow to the woman’s lead. Apparently women who like sex, still called nymphomaniacs at this point in history, deserve whatever a hook wielding madman has to visit down upon those who indulge in pre-marital sex. And oddly enough the fact that prostitutes are called hookers actually has nothing at all to do with this urban legend, since the term was in use for more than a full century before the 1950s.
The Hook is just like other urban legends, from the myth of Bloody Mary, alligators in the sewers, steel toe boots that cut off your toes, and even modern tales of the urban Internet such as the Slender Man meme all have their origin in the same place. Modern day fairy tales with time honored traditions to teach. Don’t play with spirits, stay out of places you’re not supposed to be, never trust what someone tells you is safe and above all this really happened to someone, somewhere, and it could happen to you too.
“Urban Legends Decoded: The Hook,” by Anonymous at Discovery
“The Hook,” by Barbara Mikkelson at Snopes
“The Hook Urban Legend,” by Anonymous at Halloween Website
