IN PURSUIT OF MONSTERS
SOME IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAYS FROM NEW DOCUMENTARY SERIES SASQUATCH
Sasquatch
Crave
For the skeptics, conspiracy theorists and true-blue believers among us, monsters are everywhere.
Sasquatch, a new documentary series produced by brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (Wild Wild Country), takes America’s long fascination with the folkloric beast as a starting point and weaves it with the growing wave of popular true-crime tales that equally scratch at an unknowable itch. Sasquatch asks: Did such a creature really the kill three men in 1993 on a marijuana farm in Northern California?
The three-part series, streaming on Crave and directed by Joshua Rofé (who made a 2019 documentary that revisited the case of Lorena Bobbitt), recounts a story from gonzo investigative journalist turned filmmaker David Holthouse, who also narrates and acts as onscreen guide. Holthouse remembers a night, while working at a pot farm in the fall of 1993 in Mendocino County, Calif., in which a group of migrant workers came back shaken and convinced a sasquatch had just killed three people in the woods.
The series takes the viewer on Holthouse’s winding investigation into sasquatch lore, the murder in question (along with possible related incidents) and an examination of the types of communities that are typically ignored or prefer to operate in the shadows.
Along with a spoiler alert, here are some take-aways:
IT’S NOT REALLY ABOUT SASQUATCH
Here’s the “but.” The first episode takes a fairly serious interrogation into sasquatch mythology and people who devote time and energy trying to prove its existence. But by Episode 2, aspiring and existing cryptozoologists might be disappointed as Holthouse and Rofé sort of shoo away further exploration of the big, bad beast in favour of the explicitly stated monsters of our own design.
There are some fascinating looks at the history of the marijuana-growing subculture of Northern California’s Emerald Triangle and at the often-outrageous militaristic effort by the government to crack down on it. Interviews with members of Operation Green Sweep and the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting — and the farmers whose crops were being destroyed — show why it’s difficult to get locals to talk about anything going on in their world, sasquatch or otherwise.
BUT THE SASQUATCH SUBCULTURE IS DELIGHTFUL
Viewers may not get a full parade of kooks or zany characters who claim they’ve touched or hung out with the big fella, but they get a good enough sense of what they’re all about. This includes a dissection of the most notable piece of sasquatch evidence to date — the Patterson-gimlin film, which stands as the equivalent of the Zapruder footage for Bigfoot hunters. It shows fairly clear and convincing visual evidence of what you’d imagine: a big, hairy-looking thing that ever so subtly acknowledges the camera and goes about its business. The 1967 clip was filmed by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in Humboldt County, Calif. Patterson, a known Bigfoot enthusiast, died in 1972, but Gimlin, initially a more skeptical counterpart, appears here to tell the fateful tale of how the duo captured the footage on horseback.
But then you get to his neighbour, Bob Hieronimus, who claims to have been paid to put on an ape suit and appear as the figure in the film. The he-said/he-said testimony from the two Bobs is a great bit of comic relief.
THE SKETCHY CHARACTERS INCLUDE THE NARRATOR
It’s a risky proposition to balance an entire series on the storytelling abilities of one man and his voice. Thankfully, for the most part, Holthouse is an engaging character.
There are typical truecrime visual and structural trappings, but his gonzo sensibilities work for the series. Holthouse’s attempts to untangle contradictions, make discoveries and conduct interviews works well enough, but Sasquatch shines when he hides the camera and explores property without permission, or talks with distrustful but often surprisingly forthcoming sources about the seedy underground network of growers that still haunts the community.
Holthouse might not be a 100 per cent reliable narrator, but is very forthcoming about his own extraordinary background as a survivor of sexual assault. The heart of the documentary comes into focus as his own personal quest to find Bigfoot reveals a passion for hunting down the monsters of the world.