Capturing Bigfoot is playing in select theaters and is available to stream on Prime Video starting October 20.
Bigfoot is alive and was born in Yakima, Washington.
Keep your hairy suits on; the mythical creature is not alive alive in the same way you and I are. However, he remains alive in the public imagination. One of the primary reasons for this, as seen in director Marq Evans’ fascinating documentary Capturing Bigfoot, has to do with a short film made way back in 1967 by a group of Washingtonians that supposedly captured footage of the creature walking with a memorably lumbering gait in the remote woods of California. The infamous Patterson-Gimlin film, named for two of its creators, Roger Patterson (who died in 1972) and Robert “Bob” Gimlin, has continued to endure over the decades, picked apart by doubters just as it is still held up as almost a sacred document by believers.
It’s a subject that’s ripe for deeper analysis, and Capturing Bigfoot – which premiered back at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival, where it already began to make waves in the Bigfoot community – not only delivers on that front, but also in its look at the people who made the 1967 film. It’s a solidly entertaining watch, bringing to light the reality of what's out there lurking in the woods, but it also offers something more in how it gets at the deeper, more painful, and yet still beautiful psychological mysteries living inside the human mind.
While Evans gives plenty of attention to the Bigfoot of it all and the hold it has over so many, critically, he’s not making a film that’s solely about the creature. Instead, that is, if anything, merely the entry point to something far more illuminating. With patient, incisive filmmaking and thoughtful care, Evans uncovers not only the truth about the Patterson-Gimlin film – and the being it “captured” – but also infinitely more valuable revelations about the people who made it and those who now have to live with its legacy. While this all builds to a genuinely stunning revelation by showing what is essentially the most significant “deleted scene” in Bigfoot cinema history, it's the journey of getting there that makes Capturing Bigfoot a consistently compelling gem. You come to see all of not only who Roger Patterson was, but the impact his film had on his son, Clint, as he sorts through his father’s legacy. Is Roger a trickster who lied to his son and everyone he knew? Is he a filmmaker in his own right who made an enduring work of cinema? Or is he just another struggling hustler who was trying to carve out his piece of the ever-elusive American dream?
Ultimately, the Patterson patriarch was trying to tell a story that, yes, he could use to make some money, but it became much more than that. To both those who knew him and many who didn’t, his film became something that provided so much over the years. We hear this not just from Clint, but also those like the late Bigfoot expert (and academic) Jeffrey Meldrum, who attended a screening of the film as a child shortly after it was made. The experience left an impact on Meldrum and gave him something to believe in as an adult, so to then hear it may have all been premised on a lie is a psychologically difficult thing to reckon with. As Meldrum says at one point, sounding more than a little anxious, he feels like he’s being led “up to a precipice and you’re just about to push me over the edge.” When he later watches new footage that upends everything that he’d come to believe about Bigfoot, we see in his eyes that so much of his worldview and life’s purpose is crumbling.
Even as this could all seem rather silly or, even worse, cruel or exploitative, Evans never looks down on his subjects or seeks to take advantage of them. There is a compassion to the filmmaking, even as the subjects are made to confront the lies that surround them and have shaped their lives. Evans asks the tough questions when he needs to and doesn’t shy away from the more thorny reality of what actually happened, but he also works to understand what it was about the film and Bigfoot that still means so much to many of those he talks to.
Whether the Patterson-Gimlin film is a fake or not, it’s not going to stop people from believing in Bigfoot or anything else that they need to. It’s not about what makes factual sense, but what makes emotional sense and allows such folks to feel like they have some agency over the stories in their lives. There is a painfully tragic dimension to this, as such ideas are inherently built upon buying into a delusion, but it’s also a deeply human, occasionally darkly humorous, and potentially dangerous reality of our world. Even as Capturing Bigfoot doesn’t fully dive into the more expansive implications of this, it does reveal the darker truths and lies that can exist within all of us. There will always be the things we build our lives around and hold closely to. This one just happened to take the form of a giant, hairy cryptid. Thus, while the physical being may not be real, there will always be more Bigfoots. Bigfoot is dead. Long live Bigfoot.