Urban Legend is a 1998 slasher film directed by Jamie Blanks, written by Silvio Horta, and starring Jared Leto, Alicia Witt, Rebecca Gayheart, Tara Reid, and Michael Rosenbaum, and is the first installment in the Urban Legend film series. Its plot focuses on a series of murders on the campus of a private New England university, all of which appear to be modeled after popular urban legends. In addition to its younger cast, the film features supporting performances from Robert Englund, Loretta Devine, John Neville, and Brad Dourif. Filmed in Toronto in the spring of 1998, Urban Legend was released in the United States on September 25, 1998. It grossed $72.5 million worldwide on a budget of $14 million, and received generally negative reviews from critics, with chief criticisms being that the film was a blatant rip-off of Scream (1996). The film has been credited by both cinema and folklore scholars as being one of the first major films to redistribute the urban legends and folklore depicted within it to the public. It was followed by two sequels: Urban Legends: Final Cut, which was released theatrically in 2000, and the direct-to-video film Urban Legends: Bloody Mary in 2005. In February 2020, a reboot of the film was announced to be in development, to be written and directed by Colin Minihan. Plot A killer decapitates Pendleton University student Michelle Mancini in the backseat of her car during a rainstorm. Meanwhile, at the campus coffee shop, student Parker Riley regales friends Natalie Simon and Brenda Bates by describing a massacre in the abandoned Stanley Hall dormitory, which journalism student Paul Gardner discredits as an urban legend. News of Michelle's murder spreads the following day, but Dean Adams and campus police officer Reese Wilson seem determined to bury the story. Damon Brooks, a jokester fraternity member, attempts to console the notably-disturbed Natalie, who rejects his sexual advances while in his parked car at a bluff. When Damon goes outside to urinate, an assailant in a hooded parka attacks him and hangs him from a tree. Natalie flees for help, but Damon's body and car have disappeared when she returns with Reese. Parker and his girlfriend Sasha Thomas assure Natalie that Damon has pranked her. Later, while Natalie sleeps, the killer strangles her goth roommate Tosh Guaneri to death. She finds Tosh's body in the morning, along with a bloody message scrawled on the