Killer Portraits: An Urban Legend and Moral Panic in the 1990s

Аннотация

The article is about an urban legend that was disseminated through certain parts of Russia in 1996–1997. At this time rumours about Satanists were current in Russia, as in many countries, and sometimes gave rise to the so-called ‘moral panics’ that have been described in the scholarly literature. According to the rumours that circulated in Sverdlovsk Oblast and the area surrounding Moscow in 1996–1997, between the photograph and the frame of children’s portraits taken by professional photographers, photographs of parts of other people’s bodies, funeral appurtenances, and other unrelated objects would be inserted, with the result that the child in the photograph would be harmed. People who heard these rumours took studio portraits that they had out of their frames and showed them to experts — psychics or churchmen. As well as material from newspapers and television broadcasts of the 1990s, a memoir of these events recorded by the author is analysed, and for comparison, variants of the same urban legend published on the Internet in the 2000–2010s are adduced. The concept of moral panics is used as a theoretical approach. The questions of the reasons for the explosive proliferation of the urban legend and of the forms this proliferation took are raised. As the article shows, ideas of the portrait as a double of the person portrayed, and of the possibility of doing harm to someone by means of an image (which caused the disturbances about ‘hell-depicting icons’ in the nineteenth century and still exist in Russia today) played a part in igniting the moral panic of the 1990s.