MY SUMMER OF SASQUATCH

I remember one of my first acting jobs out of drama school.  It was an indie vampire movie entitled RAZOR BLADE SMILE (1998).  I played a photographer attempting to capture proof of the undead.  One of the scenes was shot in a long-since-shuttered North London pizza joint that featured coffins for tables. That was a good set lunch.   The filmmaker, Jake West, would go on to direct probably the funniest dark comedy about alien abduction ever made.  EVIL ALIENS (2005) easily earned its place in the space invaders canon thanks to the slaughter of little green men at the hands of The Wurzels hit single, I’ve Got a Brand New Combine Harvester.

But for me, the damned and otherworldly beings have lost their potency.  These creatures have been diluted to the point that they walk among us, seeking sanctuary within humankind from their own failings or longings.  

Vampires began as an examination of what truly lurked within the Victorian psyche.  Beneath the gentility of the grandest person was something still driven by primitive lusts.  It could not be cut out like a cyst.  No more!  A bottle of synthetic blood substitute and a dab of sunscreen, and Vlad might as well run for public office.

So where do we look for the primitive within us? There is the serial killer, of course.  Yet, the stigma of a psychopathic brain prevents him from being the creature we can all identify with.  What in the age of conspiracy theories concocted by a bored populace can instill in grown men and women a fear that cannot be explained by the logical mind?

This was no bear…

The first time I heard a now infamous 911 call from a man living in the countryside surrounding Seattle, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. All the fear of what the caller was looking at through his living room window was displayed in his voice.  The man did everything in his power to withhold the identity of the being that had killed his dog and was now staring right at him, separated by only a few feet and a thin pane of glass.  He had made eye contact with a Sasquatch.

As the pandemic lockdown stretched on, I decided to give myself an assignment to watch every Bigfoot film I could find on the various streaming services.  Each was terrifying in its own way.  In ABOMINABLE (2006), the creature sought to satiate its hunger, in EXISTS (2014), it was out for revenge, and in Bobcat Goldthwait’s masterpiece of suspense, WILLOW CREEK (2013),  in which we never see a single hairy creature, it’s all about courting a forest bride. Helluva first date! As a screenwriter and producer, I have a Bigfoot movie going into production next year. So, this was an opportunity to see how other filmmakers are exploring the subgenre.

Yet, it is in THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT (2018) that we truly come to understand that the missing link is us.  We consign it to the deepest wood and highest mountain, but primitive man is still walking this earth.  He’s stronger and faster than us, stealth-like where we are clumsy, but also self-aware.

In the 2000s, there was an event in the far north of Canada in which a Sasquatch was seen walking through the centre of a First Nations community.  The international press descended.  A documentary was made that focused on how that international presence changed the town forever.  The subject was not about a creature thought to be myth.  That would be a preposterous notion to the people who have had a respectful truce with the wild men of the mountains since long before Europeans came to the Americas.

And so I found myself finishing my Summer of Bigfoot with 2019’s true tale of a journalist’s time investigating sasquatch accounts among the First Nations people of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest.  In the book, IN THE VALLEYS OF THE NOBLE BEYOND: IN SEARCH OF THE SASQUATCH by John Zada, the writer approaches the subject much in the spirit of the eyewitness accounts by hunters and hikers; those who see the Sasquatch are changed forever.  The main reason for this is because what they see reminds them of themselves.

Mr. Zada recounts the harrowing trauma from a woman’s youth.  Her family had been fishing, when a Sasquatch was spotted on the shoreline of the lake. It had seen them at the same time.  The family rushed into their fishing cabin only to be tormented at night, when the 8-foot creature crawled under the dwelling and scratched at the floorboards.

The book is incredibly evocative in its descriptions of one of the last great and threatened wilderness regions on our continent.  I felt the forest’s soft, wet earth while walking on a treadmill.  In reading, I also came to understand how we humans have consigned our primal selves to the dark places of the world.  We may think such banishment means our primitive side no longer exist.  But it’s still there… watching.

My daughter also has a fascination with Sasquatch. It’s an opportunity to share in the undiscovered with her father, while secure in the knowledge the pause button is within reach. Her words about Sasquatch after yet another viewing of HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS (1987) sums up my own feelings. “I want to go camping, Daddy, but I don’t want to see Bigfoot. Well, maybe I do. Is he nice?” The answer to that question lies within ourselves.