Crypt TV Fables: Who Is the Piper?

I discovered Crypt TV a few months ago when an episode of Jon Solo's Messed Up Origins series covered the story of the Pied Piper. I subsequently went back and watched some of their other videos and was impressed with what I found.

Cinematic quality content from a YouTube channel? Yes, please!

So, what type of content does Crypt TV offer? The best way I can describe them is: Horror Fan Paradise. They do short horror movies—of sorts with the aim of creating a cinematic universe linking all of the shorts together.

The best part about these short films is that they keep you guessing; you're never sure what's happening and even afterwards you sit and wonder about it.

Have I hyped it up too much? I hope not. Anyways, let's look at their Pied Piper short: Kinderfanger "Piper's Song" and see if we can figure out exactly WHO the piper actually is.

So, what do we have?

We've got a group of parents looking for missing children. Among the searchers is a partly-deaf girl named Jordan looking for her brother Max. She follows the sound of a flute (and some menacing black smoke) into a cave where she finds her brother and the other missing children standing in a circle around a demonic skeletal piper.

She frees her brother and the other children seemingly escape on their own and all is well, right? No, the children run back to their parents and promptly slaughter everyone.

The Original Tale

The Tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin

The town of Hamelin in Germany has a serious rat infestation with the rodents causing all kinds of chaos around town. The townspeople reach their wit's end and a mysterious man appears with an offer to solve the rat problem—for a price. An agreement is reached and the piper takes a flute from inside his robes and starts to play. The hypnotic tune of the flute draws the rats out of Hamelin and he leads them into a river where most of them drowned. Once the rats are gone, the piper returns to receive his payment and the town basically laughs at him, refusing to pay.

This, understandably, angers the piper who leaves and swears revenge. He returns a short time later, hypnotizes 130 children, and leads them out of Hamelin into a cave in the middle of nowhere where they were never seen again.

Some Questions

In order to put together a theory, let's ask some questions about Jordan and the Piper:

1. Why did Jordan hear the music when the adults couldn't?
2. Jordan finds the cave. If the adults knew it was there, why didn't they check it out?
3. Why did the piper take the children?
4. Where did the piper come from?

Some Answers/Ideas

If we go by the original tale, the above-listed questions make a lot of sense.

The piper hypnotized children in order to take his revenge against the people of Hamelin for their dishonesty. Jordan, with the help of her hearing aid, hears the music because she's a child. The tune that the Kinderfanger was playing was aimed at hypnotizing children. So, we've got why Jordan heard the music and nobody else did; what about the cave?

We can apply the same logic to the point of the cave. The piper in the original story led the children into a cave never to be seen again. Now, as I understand it; the adults in the original tale were at church when the piper returned and took their kids. With that in mind, they wouldn't know where the meddling musician had waltzed off to with their children. This opens up a possibility that the adults in the short didn't know about the cave—it would be wrong—but it's an option.

The reason that assumption would be wrong is that we clearly see them at the end of the short staring at the cave entrance watching their kids return. So, maybe they knew and hadn't gotten around to checking it out or maybe they did and found nothing (come on the piper in this version is an evil spirit with magic powers).

With regard to the piper himself, where did he come from and why take the children?

Some Historical Stuff to Start the Theory off Proper

Now, one of the theories on the Piper's identity was that maybe these kids were descended from the people who originally cheated him. Seems like a bit of a stretch, right? Well, not so much; see the records in Hamelin state that:

"It is 100 years since our children left."

The way I understand it, "children" in that time period could've meant citizens of the town. So, it's possible that 100 citizens/families left Hamelin and went to live elsewhere—with their descendants eventually ending up in the USA.

So, what happened to the infamous Pied Piper of Hamelin?

My Theory: The Piper in the Seance...

What if, after the piper sauntered off with all those children, he returned to Hamelin to try and force the people to pay what they owed him? Maybe the locals killed him instead...

The piper shows up and offers a deal. Instead of bargaining with him, however, the grieving families lynch him and burn him at the stake—not a forensics expert or anything but that skeleton looks like it was in a fire. The parents of the missing children then leave Hamelin—unable to bear the pain of being in the place anymore—and go elsewhere.

Hundreds of years pass and the memory of the Piper and the grief he caused fades away into myth and legend. A group of children hear the story of the Piper and decide to try a seance to summon the ghost—it's meant as a joke and nothing happens so they think nothing of it and go about their business.

Unbeknownst to the children, their attempt was successful and the piper is FURIOUS! The people who'd killed him had long since died and he goes after the adults—only to find that, for whatever reason, they aren't affected by his magic. A truly evil idea forms in his twisted mind and he pulls a repeat performance of his final tune; hypnotizing children and leading them into a cave in the middle of nowhere. While he's got the children with him, the cruel spirit poisons their minds with thoughts of murder.

Then Jordan shows up and rescues her brother; thereby throwing a wrench into the works—so to speak. The piper senses the arrival of the parents of the children and turns them loose to do his bidding. What follows is the start of the piper's bloody vengeance as his young minions brutally murder their parents. The piper appears behind Jordan and Max to gloat and then kills them both before moving and continuing to wreak havoc on the descendants of his murderers by using the children to do his bidding.

Final Thoughts... Wow, that was morbid...

Wow, that was... surprisingly morbid. No, really that was much darker than I thought it'd be! It was also, surprisingly, a lot of fun; I don't know if I'll do more stuff on the Crypt TV shorts but it's definitely something that I'll be looking into.

Speaking of Crypt TV, if you guys like good horror content then definitely give these guys a look. I also highly recommend Jon Solo and his Messed Up Origins series.

Finally, I want to know what you thought of this article as well as your own thoughts on Kinderfanger. Look me up on Facebook and let me know all your thoughts.