‘Sasquatch’ features county, pot, and Bigfoot
Hulu series drops on streaming platform April 20
“Sasquatch” — a docuseries that premiered at SXSW last week — features two of Humboldt County’s most talked-about exports: cannabis and Bigfoot.
Hulu, which plans to launch the three-part series on the cannabis holiday April 20, bills it like this:
“While visiting a pot farm in Northern California in 1993, investigative journalist David Holthouse heard a story that still haunts him: On a nearby farm, three men were torn limb from limb in a savage Bigfoot attack. ‘Sasquatch’ follows David as he revisits the redwoods 25 years later, in search of any evidence that might lead to the truth of what happened that night. As he pulls at the threads of this story, he’ll be taken down a path that’s far more terrifying than anyone would have imagined.”
Samantha Karges, a spokesperson for the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, said the agency is not ready to weigh in on the series or the alleged triple homicide. She said the sheriff’s office might weigh in after “we have a chance
to fully review the content being shown on Hulu.”
“As always, we remind the community that while it is exciting to have Humboldt County featured in a national tv show or movie, please know that this is a Hollywood-manufactured drama and was designed to be sold for a profit,” Karges said in an email.
The “Sasquatch” series is directed by Joshua Rofé, who is known for an Amazon documentary series on Lorena Bobbitt, and produced by the Duplass Brothers.
The trailer of the series shows the journalist as he tries to unravel the murder saga he heard decades before.
“I’m venturing into dangerous territory with all these hippies listening to the Grateful Dead but packing an AR-15,” Holthouse tells viewers.
Humboldt County has for years been a target for sasquatch stories, from the Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967 that purportedly shows the mythical creature around the Bluff Creek area of eastern Humboldt County. Willow Creek three years ago was named one of the top 20 locations to find Bigfoot.
Humboldt County has also been in the spotlight in recent years for its place in the cannabis industry, its history of missing person’s cases, and violence in the Netflix-aired docuseries “Murder Mountain.”
A review posted on Roger Ebert’s website suggests the series was well-received.
“It is not all about Bigfoot, one must say right off the bat, because I suspect that most people wouldn’t want to get into a series that’s about Bigfoot hunters unless it had a “Tiger King”-like epic attached (which was something around what I expected),” reviewer Nick Allen wrote in his review. “Instead, the shadows of ‘Sasquatch’ are of a lawless land, as sinister and all-American as cutthroat capitalism, racism, and the exploitation of immigrant labor. Joshua Rofé’s documentary puts us in the front-seat of an investigative journalist’s journey into the abyss, where people commonly disappear, and cops fear to tread.”