“The Secret Agent”: understand the urban legend of the “hairy leg”

Or acclaimed “The Secret Agent” arrived in cinemas last week and delivered to the public a story full of regional syncretism with the backdrop of the military dictatorship.

The film is set in Recife during the military dictatorship and has as its backdrop the carnival week 1977. With national and international references, the production has some curiosities about the Pernambuco folklore. While the narrative follows the events in the life of Marcelo (Wagner Moura), who becomes a political refugee in Brazil, the audience is introduced to the history of Hairy Leg.

The director Kleber Mendonça Filho brought to his fiction an urban legend that scared Recife in the 1970s. The origins of the story are unclear, and different journalists reaffirm the authorship of the legend.

The newspaper Diário de Pernambucano of December 11, 1975, made the first mention of a member who haunted the residents of the village of 500 residents of Usina Tiúma, in São Lourenço da Mata. After appearing at the house of Mr. José Luis Borges and scare his family, the leg began to be seen by his neighbors, says the report “Ghost Leg is already a police problem”which has no author.

Residents interviewed for the article described a severed leg, full of hair and nails that raped people during the night. “The ‘leg’ measures approximately one and a half meters, it walks all over the house, hangs from the roof and turns into an animal”, described the report from local residents and was treated as something “mystical”.

In February 1976, the journalist Raimundo Carrero wrote in his detective novel column a chronicle of a hairy leg attack in Olinda. In the plot, the leg had attacked a woman inside her own home and left the victim in agony. So, a delegation was formed to hunt down the element that was a danger to the residents.

Among the chronicles and reports of people who swore they were victims or had fought with the bouncing limb, Perna Cabeluda gained more strength in Pernambuco’s imagination. A few days after Carrero’s chronicle, the Diário de Pernambuco reported that the legend had become a frevo theme song for Carnivalauthored by Joel Santos and Dimas Sedícias.

Another supposed author of the legend goes back to the journalist Jota Ferreirawho in 2017 shared a video saying that he had created the story of Perna Cabeluda in a radio program also from the 1970s.” fill in the timethat I had no more news to share”, he said.

In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s plot, the mythical element gains space, haunting the residents of Recife. The director shared some reports from the time about the legend and declared: “I don’t know if there is another city where fantastic stories appeared in the newspaper as news. And 50 years before fakenews was out in the open.”