Tears for Fears: the curse of the crying boy

The Crying Boy is a label used to describe a genre of inexpensive, mass-produced portrait print that were popular during the 1970s with working class families in the UK. In 1985-86 a tabloid newspaper, The Sun, published a series of hyperbolic stories reporting a ‘curse’ that was allegedly attached to this example of folk art. The source of the rumour were fire fighters who reported the frequent occurrence of undamaged examples of the prints at domestic property fires in one South Yorkshire mining community. The intervention of journalists introduced the idea of the ‘curse’ and added a supernatural/inexplicable element to the story. This article revises content from a summary account of the ‘crying boy’ narratives published in 2008 (Clarke 2008; Clarke 2011). This analysis updates the developing legend with new material including interviews with the journalists and the results of a content analysis of news coverage. It examines the specific role played by journalists in the evolution of the nascent contemporary legend from print to social media.