The first murder in the film - involving a girl who wakes up in a bathtub of ice, missing a kidney - starts the film with some gruesome shocks, and contains the most disturbing imagery.

"[Originally] the first death was the suicide of Trevor, which is off-screen; you don't even see it, and that's what I liked about the script because it wasn't the typical thing - it's like you hear about this death and you're not sure it happened - but the audience needs something more tangible, so we added our new character in the beginning of the show."

Though somewhat at odds with the overall tone of the film, the sequence does kick-start the movie with a visceral punch, and owes a great deal to the elaborate death montages of Italian director Dario Argento.

Best known for the landmark thriller and horror films Profondo Rosso (1975) and Suspiria (1977), Argento's victims are generally chased through cavernous, labyrinthine locations, and are generally dispatched to Heaven with a throat slashing or hanging - but not before the victim's head artfully crashes through a pane of glass.

Though he admits to not being familiar with Argento's work, Ottman's direction of the first murder is very much in tune with Argento's fetishes (as is the subsequent bell tower sequence), and inadvertently satirizes the cat-and-mouse interplay of Suspiria, tossing in some barbed wire, decapitation by window, and a hungry dog with an appetite for fresh kidney.

The sequence fulfills the requisite opening shocker for the movie, and once dispensed with, Ottman is able to use his editorial experience to structure his film with peaks of violence and valleys of character development.

Though billed as a teen slasher, Urban Legends: Final Cut does contain more straightforward dramatic scenes, and it's often these integral moments of character and plot information that reveal a director's competence. Just letting a scene play out sounds so simple, and yet some directors have little patience for narrative dialogue and emotional reaction shots.

Rather than resorting to the kind of choppy editing that characterized End of Days (1999) or attention-deficit construction of Armageddon (1998), Urban Legends lets the actors think a little, react naturally, and speak their lines with more conviction than normal in a slasher film; this more traditional approach makes the eventual shocks all the more effective, and once in a while morbidly witty.

One key sequence involves a student director's worst nightmare: saddled with the most incompetent actress on the planet. Played to the hilt by actress Jessica Cauffiel, Sandra is a buffoon of epic proportions. When asked to emote sheer terror for her student director for a scene involving a ridiculously disemboweled pooch, Sandra goes through various rubbery gesticulations with unbearable ham-fisted energy; a noble tribute to the kind of surreal acting in a Dwaine Esper movie.

When she returns to the abandoned set one night, she's confronted by the killer, and becomes the star of her own snuff video, with a generous nod to Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960). Unlike the opening shocker, the sequence and the elaborate viewing of the footage the next day contains little gore, and offers another effective route, under the reins of a knowing director, to create terror without being graphic.

As Ottman relates, "There are sequences that I'm proud of. One of them is Sandra's death [when her classmates are] watching the dailies, because you're watching someone die, but you know they're dead already, so it's a passive experience, but you have to make it somehow feel suspenseful, but you already know that she's dead... So editorially, I'm pretty proud of the way that I put that together with the shots of the projector shining and shooting different image sizes off an actual screen. We shot her in 16mm, so you got the little holes on the side of the screen, and the close up of [Sandra's] eyes, and so forth."

Unlike Halloween's Michael Myers or Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees, the Urban Legends killer is a film geek, and quite proud of it. Sandra's death reveals more of the killer's arrogance, and in a later scene with the film's heroine, he moves, from producer and director of his own slasher fantasy, to composer. Trapped under a grand piano in the campus soundstage, the killer strikes the same keys, underscoring his/her elaborate murder plot.

"It was one of those situations where we actually were in overtime, and I suddenly though of this idea where, 'Don't just go and finder her - Just stand there and play the piano.' And one of the producers who was our watchdog (who was really the guy to pull the plug) said, 'You know what? This is so great that I'm authorizing you to go into overtime.' So we all knew it was a cool idea, and it sort of ends up being a strange homage to myself by being in a scoring stage."

Having composed music for the return of Michael Myers (Halloween H:20), a killer crocodile (Lake Placid), the poor, waifish Snow White (Snow White: A Tale of Terror, in 1999), and a cable technician with too much time on his hands (Cable Guy, in 1996), Ottman gave his own feature film another rich, orchestral soundtrack.

Horror scores are often little gems that most people don't notice at first - and that's actually a good thing - because it shows the music is doing what it's supposed to do: scare you to death. That's the score at its most functional level, and yet a well-crafted soundtrack will also reflect the film's moods, the characters' fears (and unbridled lust), and add some emotional subtext to the moments when a bimbo or thick-headed jock isn't being chased by an ax-wielding lunatic with big comfy boots.

Urban Legends' music is characteristically creepy during the stalkings, murders and corpse discoveries, often using a large orchestra and some avant garde writing. Ottman periodically incorporates a lilting theme to evoke the confusion of a traumatized child, something that adds more depth to a scene, and polishes the film overall.

Now that John Ottman has advanced from composer to editor to feature film director, the next hurdle will be Hollywood's perception of who Ottman is. In an age where singers act, producers direct, writers produce, and composers edit, there should be room for another multi-talent.

"My aim is to have my cake and eat it too, and that is to keep scoring films," clearly Ottman's first love, "And direct films that I score."

On February 6th, Columbia TriStar Home Video will release Ottman's film on DVD in an anamorphic transfer. In addition to a featurette, the DVD will include deleted scenes (with a partial section of the "Odessa Steps" sequence), and a running commentary from John Ottman, in which he touches upon his role as director, editor, and composer.

Ottman's own enjoyable website, dubbed "The Asylum," (http://www.johnottman.com) offers some candid production recollections, a still gallery, and soundtrack highlights from Urban Legends 2: Final Cut.