Cropsey (The Burning) vs Madman Marz (Madman)
The FORBIDDEN Death Battle Prediction Blog Episode 22
Original Fight 12
Cropsey (The Burning, 1981) vs Madman Marz (Madman, 1980)
Who Are These Characters? What’s the theme?
They’re both slashers from 1981, an early year for slasher films, and predate the appearance of sackhead Jason by a year. They’re both campfire legends told to frighten campers who turn out to be very, very real. They’re both disfigured, insane, and far stronger than any normal man. And they’re both based on the urban legend of Cropsey. The Burning’s Cropsey straight-up takes his name from the urban legend and Madman Marz was planned to be called Cropsey during production of Madman.
Cropsey is an urban legend from Staten Island. As with all urban legends, Cropsey comes in a lot of variations. The general idea is that Cropsey is an escaped lunatic from whatever asylum is close to wherever his story is being told. Where the legend first started, it was Willowbrook asylum, an abandoned and overgrown building out in the woods that inspired arboreal killer shacks in movies for years to come. Cropsey was said to still live in the ruins and go roaming for nearby children to abduct and kill/eat/sacrifice to Satan/all of the above. Sometimes he was said to be disfigured. Sometimes he was said to have a hook for a hand. The uber-popular hook-handed man of lover’s lane legend spun off from Cropsey.
But do you want to know the scariest thing about Cropsey?
He was real.
He was a child killer named Andre Rand who lived out of Willowbrook.
If you want to deep-dive some true crime horror for Halloween, here are some videos for you on the subject of the Cropsey legend and its real-life inspiration:
17 minute video on Cropsey and Andre Rand.
22 minute video, a little longer than the first but in my opinion better.
1 hour and 24 minute documentary. I highly recommend it if you got the time.
Real-life monsters are often the inspiration for fictional monsters. Just look at how many superpowered Jack the Rippers and Hitlers there are. It’s no surprise that Andre Rand, legendized as Cropsey, inspired characters like the ones used in today’s match.
Cropsey (The Burning, 1981)
“ By now he’s out there. Watching. Waiting. Don’t look! He’ll see you. Don’t’ breathe! He’ll hear you. Don’t move…you’re dead!”
The Campfire Story of Cropsey.
The film opens a few years ago. A group of teenage campers have had it with camp groundskeeper Copsey. He beats up the kids and scares them by snicker-snacking his extra-large gardening shears (how’s that for foreshadowing?). So they’re going to teach Cropsey a lesson. They’re going to scare the shit out of him.
The kids build a skull effigy candle and sneak it into his bunk while he’s sleeping. Then they rap on his window to wake him up.
Cropsey freaks out…and knocks the candle onto his bedsheet. Which sets him on fire.
Oops.
Cropsey spends some time in the hospital where his awesome Tom Savini makeup scares the doctors. When he’s released, his doctors advise him to forgive the kids. It was just a prank, bro.
He doesn’t.
After a hooker freaks out at his appearance, Cropsey decides that he’s had it with semi-sanity and takes a forceful leap off the deep-end. He guts the hooker (and twists the blade) and heads back to camp.
Once there, he does what slashers typically do on campgrounds.
The Burning is a slasher classic and a must-see if you’re interested in the genre. The strength of the film is in how it develops the victims before Cropsey strikes. Cropsey has a very muted presence throughout most of the film. We don’t even get a good look at him until the very last few minutes of the film where he looks like Mr. X from Resident Evil with the face of Sloth from The Goonies.
HEY YOU DIEEEEEEES!
The film is less like a standard slasher film and more like Jason wandered into Little Darlings. Most of the film is about this camp filled with rambunctious, bawdy teens awkwardly exploring their sexuality. It’s interesting watching them jockey for social dominance. The kids bully each other, get embarrassed, stand up for each other in friendship–they’re humanized far more than you would expect for a slasher film and it makes the brutal, uncompromising violence all that more stark. You don’t want to see the kids die–not even the big, stupid jock. When you care about the victims, you’re in a good slasher film.
The scene that best demonstrates this is the infamous raft scene. Watch it. It starts with a raft full of kids happy and confident. They’re off to look for some lost canoes like it’s an adventure. Then the film cuts to hours later. They’re tired, bickering, but they still hold it together. The more assertive, adult kids help the younger, more anxious ones.
Then they see a canoe. Their spirits lift. They paddle to with renewed strength.
And they get slaughtered.
That’s The Burning–the horror of watching children in the hands of a madman.
Stalking
–Sneaks up on people in the woods. Don’t undersell how hard that is until you try it yourself. It doesn’t take superhuman powers to walk quietly in the woods, but it does take skill. Look up “fox walking” to learn for yourself how it’s done.
Yes, you to can learn how to sneak up on helpless victims in even the most arboreous of forests! When the FBI interrogates you, be sure to tell them you learned how to be a slasher villain from Capeworld Comics!
–Scattered a victim’s clothing while she skinny dipped to distract her.
–Baited a group of victims by cutting the mooring line of their canoes, which forced them to build a raft to go looking for them. Then he hid in one of the canoes and waited for them, tired and vulnerable, to get within shearing range…
–Ambushed the jock by hiding beneath the blankets with his dead girlfriend.
Slashing
–Got a score of 8, 9 if you count the hooker at the beginning.
–Uses a large pair of gardening shears (The Burning is where the Clocktower video game series got the idea) and a flamethrower.
Where the hell did he get that?
Unfortunately for the audience, but fortunately for the special effects budget, he never gets to actually use the flamethrower on anyone. He used his shears throughout the film and then threatened the final guy with his flamethrower at the end. He probably saved the flamethrower for the final guy since he turned out to have been one of the kids that originally set him on fire. It seems that Cropsey wanted some poetic vengeance.
–While he was burning alive in the prolog, he still had enough strength to bust down his cabin door.
–In the best scene of the film, uses his trusty shears on a raft full of teens to cut wood, chop fingers, stab throats, and kill a girl in one strike by cutting her across the skull.
It’s one of the best slasher moments of all time. Seriously, you got to check it out. I didn’t put that link up there for no reason!
–Stabbed the camp’s jock in the throat, lifted him, walked with him, and stuck him to a tree. Then he withdrew his shears with a single jerk.
Surviving
–His origin story is surviving being set on fire, though he required extensive hospitalization.
–He got one of those handy “slasher second winds” after being stabbed in the back with his own shears. He was then killed by an axe to the head and set on fire. It was a pretty mild way for a slasher to die, and I think Savini knew it which is why he took the concept of “the killer dies by being chopped in the head” and perfected it in Friday the 13th: Part IV.
Madman Marz (Madman, 1981)
“One by one, you’ll start to fall. Before night’s over, I’ll get you all.”
“Madman…Marz…He’s real…”
The Campfire Story of Madman Marz.
It’s a simple story.
Years ago, a farmer went crazy. Why did he go crazy? No one knows. It’s scarier that way. He just snapped and took an axe to his wife and then his kids.
It took ten men to lynch the farmer, but when they went to cut him down the next morning, he was nowhere to be found…
Campfire legend has it that he still survives out of the ruins of his old farmstead and prowls the woods looking for people to either chop into pieces or hang from trees.
When a teenager named Ritchie hears the story, he laughs it off and decides to challenge Madman Marz by throwing a rock through his window.
Bad move, Ritchie. Bad move.
Madman Marz shows up and proceeds to do what slashers typically do at campsites.
He also wins, which is a rarity for slashers.
He downs the final girl and drags her to his hook-filled basement like its Dead by Daylight. While on the hook, she then takes out a knife and stabs him in the back, also like its Dead by Daylight (decisive strike is a cancer of a survivor perk).
It doesn’t work.
All it does is make Madman Marz knock over a candle and set fire to his display of victims, but he’s still very much alive and all his victims very much aren’t.
Most slashers either lose or at best have a SURPRISE I STILL LIVE moment right before the credits. But not Madman Marz. The dude just wins.
As a movie, I was surprised how much I liked Madman. It’s not as good as The Burning, but it’s still good. It’s simple, unpretentious, and doesn’t drag. It’s the quintessential slasher flick like Friday the 13th Part IV. There’s no frills and no drag. The kills are well-paced and well-executed. The hanging kill in particular is great. The victim fights all the way to the end. Even when he’s hanging, he pulls himself up and grabs a tree branch. It looks like he might actually make it at that point–but Marz grabs his belt and pulls him down. There’s a lot of close calls like that in the film and it makes it suspenseful to watch.
There’s also a lot of really good, really memorable imagery–the kind of stuff that makes a good slasher film. There’s a scene near the end where the final girl is looking for Madman Marz inside his house–and the audience sees him behind her, but then a shadow falls over him and when it moves he isn’t there. The film uses a blue filter a lot which makes scenes appear surreal and dreamlike. It’s used wonderfully in the opening campfire story where we cut from the campfire and the real, unfiltered night to Marz’s house in the blue filtered night. It reminded me a lot of the “He’s gone! He’s gone!” scene from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me where we cut to scenes of power lines shot in a different way from the rest of the film to convey the idea that we’re looking at supernatural and otherworldly actions.
Am I going to film critic hell for comparing Madman to Twin Peaks? Probably. But that’s where all the good film critics are.
The sticking point for a lot of people is probably going to be Madman Marz himself. He’s a big redneck that looks like he’s slowly turning into a sasquatch. A lot of people are going to find him campy, and this isn’t a film trying to be campy. It doesn’t help that he growls a lot and that his growls sound like the titular character of Suburban Sasquatch. But I dig how he looks. I thought he was goofy at first but the look grew on me as the film went on. He looks like the killer from a goofy campfire story, and I think that’s the point. You want to laugh at him at first like Ritchie but then he starts making corpses with his inhuman strength. I think the goofy way he looks is deliberate. Ritchie is kind of like an audience surrogate in the movie. He sees things happen but he never actually interacts with Marz. He never gets spotted and he never gets chased. We see Madman Marz like Ritche sees him–a goofy character that he learns to respect by watching.
Stalking
–Moves through the woods without making a sound. See Cropsey’s entry for why this is a big deal.
–Ran alongside a slowly moving car and pulls a victim out of a window.
This feat gave me flashbacks to Friday the 13th: The Game and chasing after survivors escaping in a car. God, I wish you could have done that in the game. Sure, smashing the car’s engine and bringing it to a dead stop is better from a tactical perspective, but just YONKing a victim from a car window would have been so much fun.
–Is very patient. In one of the best scenes in the film, he waits as a victim slowly limps her way down a silent hallway. She turns the corner and sees that the coast is clear, smiles, breaks into a sprint–and dies because Marz was waiting for her.
–Has a better killer shack than Jason.
You know how Jason had a disgusting hovel in Part 2? Marz has himself an entire house complete with a storm cellar equipped with hooks for his victims–so that’s where Dead by Daylight got the idea from!
It’s got classic haunted house ambiance.
Slashing
–Got a respectable score of 7, which ties with the Prowler from last time if you combine the Prowler’s 40’s prolog kills with his kills in the present time.
–Madman Marz’s weapon of choice is an axe, but he also carries rope because that part in the campfire story about him hunting the woods looking for people to hang from trees was as true as the other parts.
–The camp has an axe embedded in a tree stump that no one seems strong enough to take out. It’s been stuck so long there’s a betting pool on it. We see two grown men try and fail to dislodge it using both their hands, but Marz comes along and with one hand casually swaps his own axe out with it with one hand.
–Beheaded a woman by jumping on the hood of a car while she was checking the engine.
–Killed a man by lifting him over his head and breaking his bones in an Argentine backbreaker rack.
–Despite Ritchie being the little brat that started everything, he managed to survive Marz rampage, though when he’s found all he can do is mutter “Madman…Marz…” so he’s traumatized for life.
I count that as a win for Marz. Like I said in the last fight, if you can’t beat ‘em, break ‘em.
Surviving
–The campfire story is confirmed by Marz’s appearance. He does indeed have part of his nose missing and he does indeed have a scar on his face which gives him several off-camera feats.
–Had part of his nose bitten off in a fight and didn’t even feel it.
–Got an axe in his face and hung from a tree but survived. When the lynch mob came back the next day, he was gone.
–When the final girl starts to drive away with a bus full of kids (prepubescents almost never die in these kinds of films), Marz gets his hand inside the folding door. The final girl has to
–Gets stabbed in the back by the final girl. It does nothing to him but make him jerk his arm and knock over a candle which sets his (already ruined) house on fire.
Looks like Dead by Daylight finally nerfed decisive strike. Took them long enough. Or maybe Madman Marz just came with really good signature perks?
Who Wins?
Madman Marz does to Cropsey what the kids couldn’t.
In terms of stalking, they’re both about the same with Cropsey having a slight edge. They both know how to move quietly in a forest, that’s the big thing, and they both know how to be patient and lure their prey. But Cropsey seems the best at pulling off traps. That canoe trap took a lot of stalking, planning, and quickness.
In terms of slashing, Marz stands well above Cropsey. If Marz gets his sasquatch-hands on Cropsey, Cropsey’s done for. Cropsey has some good strength to stab a guy, pick them up, and stick them to a tree, but Marz killed a man with an Argentine backbreaker rack. That’s some Bane-level shit.
Marz also takes the surviving category. Just look at their stories. Cropsey survived an incident that would have killed a normal dude, but only after an extensive stay in the ICU. Marz survived an incident that would have killed a normal dude by freeing himself and killing his would-be executioners one by one. Cropsey was defeated by being stabbed in the back which dropped him for several moments until he got his slasher second-wind. Marz…wasn’t defeated. He won. He got stabbed in the back and all it did was cause him a little pain.
Cropsey’s best bet is to get Marz with his flamethrower before Marz gets close enough to make Cropsey’s face even uglier than it already is, but I don’t see that as being likelier than Marz just evading the flame jet and chopping Cropsey to pieces. Even if Cropsey does manage to catch Marz on fire, he’d have to fight to keep his distance from a Madman Marz that’s also on fire and running at him. If they both get set on fire, Cropsey is going to expire way before Marz–and there’s a good chance that burning alive won’t stop Marz anyway given how tough he seems.
Beware the Madman Marz…
Music Track Name Ideas
C rank: Burning Madmen
B rank: Campground Carnage
A rank: Lore of the Campfire
S rank: Campfire Killers
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