Scaring Ourselves to Death

The article, “A Look at Urban Legends: the Gothic Outweighs the Enlightened” by Julie Perry, is at the core about anxieties and how they play the biggest role in the popularity of urban legends. However, in this article, there is much talk about gender roles in urban legends; how so often the women get the part of the damsel in distress, and the men are either the perpetrator or the savior. The article distinguishes (very minimally) between myths, folktales and legends. It talks a lot about boundaries and how they are the core of our anxieties, and that urban legends overstep our boundaries in numbers of ways because they are so outrageous.
This article, as long as it was, had little to help me with answering my question. However, what little it did have was exactly what I had been looking for. Urban legends are
“an outlet of our human fascination with the irrational and impossible, as well as a catharsis for our feelings of cultural anxiety. Anxiety is the backbone of urban legends. If they did not force us to look at our fears, rational or not, they would not have the lasting power of the hordes of followers who swear their authenticity” (Perry).This is the answer that I’ve been looking for: people love urban legends because they scare them to death. Each person has boundaries that can be crossed with urban legends, whether it be safety, sexual, space, or commercial. When one hears of the boundary being crossed that that person may find especially heinous, a shiver crawls up his/her spine and makes them aware of the danger lurking around. When a person realizes that the fear of this “danger” is somewhat irrational, he/she may be able to shrug it off and laugh thinking that it is too outrageous to ever happen to them.
Perry, Julie. "A Look at Urban Legends: the Gothic Outweighs the Enlightened." 3 Apr 2009 .