Urban Legend

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 core cast, the film features supporting performances from Robert Englund, Danielle Harris, Loretta Devine, John Neville, Natasha Gregson Wagner, and Brad Dourif. It is an international co-production between the United States, Canada and France.

Filmed in Toronto in the spring of 1998, Urban Legend was theatrically released in the United States on September 25, 1998, by TriStar Pictures (through Sony Pictures Releasing). It was a commercial success, grossing $72.5 million worldwide on a budget of $14 million, but 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.