Thursday Movie Picks #379: Horror Edition: Folk or Urban Legends

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's the second Thursday in October, which means that there's another horror-themed edition of the blogathon. For a time, I thought I was going to have trouble this week, since I thought the category was "Urban Legends", a subject I don't remember coming up too much in older movies. But I looked again and saw that the category is actually "Folk/Urban Legends", so I can go with folk legends, which are much easier to find. I did, however, in the end decide to go for one more recent movie:

The Phantom Carriage (1921). Apparently there was a legend in Sweden that at the end of each year, the Grim Reaper would take the last dead person whose soul he gathered and make that person the new Grim Reaper, having to spend a year collecting souls and looking back at his own life. That person is Victor Sjöström, as an alcoholic who gets killed in a fight and has to look back at how his drinking destroyed not only his life, but those of his family along with a Salvation Army officer who wanted to minister to him.

Cat People (1942). Simone Simon plays a Serbian immigrant who comes from an area where the Christians turned to witchcraft to deal with the Ottoman overlords, with the legend being that certain people are destined to become too cat-like for their own good. She meets engineer Kent Smith, and they fall in love, he not believing in the legend or that there's any danger. But for some reason, animals go nuts every time Simon shows up. Jacques Tourneur directed and Val Lewton produced this movie, which is one of a series of extremely effective low-budget horror movies he made at RKO in the 1940s.

The Last Broadcast (1998). "Found footage" movie that purports to be a documentary about a team's search for the Jersey Devil, a mythical creature that lives in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Unfortunately, something goes wrong, and all but one of the members of the expedition wind up dead. Was it murder, or did something else happen? This is one of those movies that used to show up on the old IFC when they actually showed independent movies, uncut and commercial-free.