Scream arrived in 1996, revitalizing slasher movies and ushering in a rush of imitators—much like Halloween and Friday the 13th did during the genre’s first wave in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. Now we’re in a third wave, with Scream’s successful return and the recent releases of brand-new movies in the late ‘90s-early 2000s I Know What You Did Last Summer and Final Destination series.
A few months ago, 1998’s Urban Legend—which spawned two sequels you’ve never heard of—was tapped with the resurrection wand and may soon be finding new life under producer Gary Dauberman (The Conjuring Universe). But the original, written off by some when it was released as a coattail-riding cash grab, is worth a fresh look.
Not only does it have a surprisingly good cast (including Twin Peaks’ Alicia Witt, Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund, a just-post-My So-Called Life Jared Leto, Halloween series veteran Danielle Harris, future Smallville star Michael Rosenbaum, and ‘90s teen dreams Joshua Jackson, Rebecca Gayheart, and Tara Reid; there’s even a cameo for Brad “Chucky” Dourif), but its premise overtly draws on the very folktales that inspired the earliest slasher films. It’s gimmicky, and it knows it—“An urban legend serial killer? It’s a stretch,” a skeptical character points out—but we wouldn’t have 1974’s Black Christmas without that old yarn about the killer who calls from inside the house.
Its setup gives Urban Legend a built-in list of terrors to choose from, as the script ticks off such scenarios as an axe-wielding killer hiding in the back seat of a car, the explosive blend of Pop Rocks and soda, the reveal of “aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?” scrawled in blood across a bedroom wall, and more.
It’s a lot of trouble for any maniac to go to. But having the main characters in college together, taking the same “introduction to folklore” class, makes the elaborate death scenes at least thematically understandable, especially once the killer’s motivation is revealed.
That said, Urban Legend is also a deeply silly movie. It can’t resist winking at the audience, whether that’s playing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in a scene where you really need a character to “turn around” (per the lyrics) and realize her doom is lurking just behind her; casting the star of A Nightmare on Elm Street as a creepy college professor; or having the car stereo of Jackson’s character reveal he was blasting the Dawson’s Creek theme song. The campus cop, played by character actor Loretta Devine, indulges her Pam Grier obsession in multiple scenes… just because.
There are also tropes galore; the “killer on a college campus” is a time-worn concept, with Black Christmas to thank once again. Nearly every slasher movie spirals from a misdeed in the past so unforgivable that gruesome payback is the only solution (at least according to the killer), and Urban Legend teases out the details of the reveal in a way that doesn’t feel completely obvious. And even if you figure out who the parka-clad murderer is before the movie wants you to, the pieces fit together in a reasonably satisfying manner.
Urban Legend being a relic of the 1990s means it’s very dated to that specific pre-smartphone, early-days-of-the-internet era. Characters go to the library and school newspaper archives to look for clues that would take 10 seconds to look up in 2025, and they run to pay phones when they need to call for help. People’s pagers go off at interrupting moments. Witt’s character has to battle with her surly roommate to use their shared landline—interrupting the girl’s dial-up message board trolling for goth dudes to hook up with.
An Urban Legend remake set in contemporary times—as all the recent slasher reboot movies have been—would have far more advanced technology to help its characters communicate while figuring out what’s happening around them. But it’ll still need to tie into the stories that justify its title, perhaps by adapting and updating urban legends that have become viral sensations. These tales may catch fire thanks to the internet, but they still draw on our deepest, darkest fears. Are you in the house alone?
Urban Legend streams on Shudder starting August 1.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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#Urban #Legend #90s #Nostalgia #Folklore #Frights #Worth #Revisiting
![Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House](https://i1.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/GeneralJoshuaRudd-1280x853.jpg?ssl=1 "Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House")
![Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/GeneralJoshuaRudd-1280x853.jpg "Anthropic’s Mythos AI Reportedly Hacked the NSA’s Most Sensitive Systems ‘in Hours’
When Anthropic first disclosed Mythos in April, it sent an anxious shockwave through much of the cybersecurity sector. The new AI model was allegedly so ruthlessly effective at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities in existing software that the company said it was holding off on a public release and would only grant access to a small group of early testers, including the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Another wave of fear reverberated this week after the NSA reportedly discovered multiple vulnerabilities within its own cybersecurity systems during its tests with Mythos. If that agency—which supposedly boasts the most impenetrable cyberdefenses in the world—can be hacked by Mythos, what hope does the rest of the world’s cybersecurity infrastructure have? This latest round of panic began with what seems to have been something of a game of telephone: Someone says one thing, which gets repeated by another, and another after that, and along that chain of communication, the original statement is distorted. Last week, The Economist reported that during a June 11 hearing before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that Mythos had broken into “almost all of [the NSA’s] classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” Warner said he’d received that information from the head of the NSA himself, General Joshua Rudd, who also leads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command division. On Monday, a coalition of intelligence agencies—including the NSA and its counterparts in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand— issued an unusually public warning that the risk that AI now poses for cybersecurity warrants a “whole-of-society response.”
The Economist’s report was seen by some as evidence that the worst fears about Mythos were true, a reaction that was undoubtedly fueled also by the aura of power and mystery that has coalesced around the model in recent months. That aura has arguably been a boon for Anthropic, which recently usurped OpenAI as the most valuable startup in the world and is preparing for what’s expected to be a historic IPO.
But it’s also been a contributing factor in its latest skirmish with the Trump administration, which ordered the company earlier this month to restrict access for all foreign nationals to Fable 5, a “Mythos-class” model that had recently been made publicly available and which was built with safeguards that to some users were annoyingly stringent. Citing national security concerns, the administration invoked an obscure piece of export control legislation, a move that, according to some legal experts, is spurious. Many cybersecurity experts, meanwhile, argued that the ban would hamstring U.S. cybersecurity defenses and give adversaries like China the upper hand. That argument was seemingly vindicated by a Tuesday report from the New York Times which said that Trump’s ban—which also targeted another model called Mythos 5, which had only been made available to a small group of organizations—had put the kibosh on the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos, and that the administration was now working with Anthropic to reinstate the agency’s access for limited purposes related to national security. The NSA did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
That same report from the Times also clarified that the NSA’s internal tests with Mythos were less apocalyptic than online rumors might suggest. According to federal officials cited in the report, the tests were carried out in a digital environment so robustly controlled that it’s very unlikely any hacker or foreign intelligence agency could replicate them. The officials also told the Times that even though Mythos was able to identify cybersecurity vulnerabilities, it didn’t actually exploit them. The author of the report in The Economist—the one that had been the initial cause of all the worry—has also admitted that his portrayal of the NSA’s tests with Mythos had been misleading. The tests “surely [involved] using Mythos alongside other tools under very particular conditions,” he wrote in a X post on Sunday. “I quoted [Senator Warner] to give a sense of Mythos’ potency. But it was a mistake not to have added caveats.” #Anthropics #Mythos #Reportedly #Hacked #NSAs #Sensitive #Systems #HoursAI,Anthropic,Mythos,NSA,Trump,White House")
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