pulled into their favorite "lovers lane" to listen to the radio and do a little necking. The music was interrupted by an announcer who said there was an escaped convict in the area who had served time for rape and robbery. He was described as having a hook instead of a right hand. The couple become frightened and drove away. When the boy took his girl home, he went around to open the car door for her. Then he saw—a hook on the door handle! I will never park to make out as long as I live. I hope this does the same for other kids. —Jeanette Literary scholar Christopher Pittard traces the plot dynamics of the legend to Victorian literature, particularly the 1913 horror novel The Lodger by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. Though the two narratives have little in common, he notes that both are built upon a "threefold relationship of crime, dirt, and chance... Such a reading also implies a reconsideration of the historical trajectory of the urban legend, usually read as a product of postmodernist consumer culture." Interpretations Folklorists have interpreted the long history of this legend in many ways. Alan Dundes's Freudian interpretation explains the hook as a phallic symbol and its amputation as a symbolic castration. Swedish folklorist Bengt af Klintberg describes the story as an example of "a conflict between representatives of normal people who follow the rules of society and those who are not normal, who deviate and threaten the normal group." American folklorist Bill Ellis interpreted the maniac in The Hook as a moral custodian who interrupts the sexual experimentation of the young couple. He sees the Hookman's disability as "his own lack of sexuality" and "the threat of the Hookman is not the normal sex drive of teenagers, but the abnormal drive of some adults to keep them apart." In popular culture A version of the story by author Alvin Schwartz appears in the 1981 collection of short horror stories for children Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. In film, the Hook legend has occasionally appeared: in a 1947 film Dick Tracy's Dilemma. fictional Detective Dick Tracy pursues a murderous killer with a hook for a hand; the killer with a hook theme has also appeared in comedies; In Meatballs (1979), Bill Murray's character retells the Hook legend to campers around a campfire. In Shrek the Halls (2007), Gingy tells