Directed by Joshua Rofé
TV-MA
Runtime: three 45-minute episodes
Premiers on Hulu April 20

by Roderick Towers, Contributor

I want you to picture a Venn diagram, two great big circles that have been growing steadily over the years to feed the public’s insatiable appetite for the bizarre. Two giant thirst traps on the pop culture landscape. On one side you have the world of the paranormal. This, my friends, is where I stock up on ghost books, download podcasts like Scream Service, and spend my nights watching shows on unexplained phenomena. The other circle contains the lurid world of true crime, where the only monster is man. True Crime is back in a big bad way and seems to exist only to oog me out beyond belief. It’s everywhere. Even people at my work have recounted grisly scenes of real life murders that they saw on whatever that popular crime show is or heard on that famous podcast everyone’s talking about, which casts a grim pallor over my cubicle and ruins the rest of my day. This stuff just ain’t for me, but right there in the middle of our diagram is a tiny section where the question has been posed, “was Bigfoot responsible for a triple homicide in the early 90’s?” Okay, now you’ve got my attention.

Hulu’s new docu-series Sasquatch, directed by Joshua Rofé and produced by the Duplass Brothers of Baghead fame, is all about storytelling, which is at the heart of both the paranormal and true crime genres. Stories whispered in hushed tones at sleepovers and around campfires are what gives these subjects their power. Whether it’s a bigfoot stalking around the woods or the serial killer down the street, they provide us the same response. These are stories that make our hair stand on end, that grow that pit in your stomach, that make your adrenaline run wild. Trying to capture the feeling of a campfire tale in the visual medium is a difficult task but they really nail the right tone here. Our storyteller on this journey is David Helthouse, a seasoned journalist whose work has put him right in the thick of some really gnarly people having written exposés on neo nazis and drug addicts. (To my movie friends, I just have to point out that he’s a dead ringer for Crispin Glover in Rubin & Ed which only makes him even cooler in my opinion.) He’s got plenty of stories to share, but there is one that has gnawed at him for years. Decades ago, while working on a cannabis farm, he heard a troubling tale. Late one night, one of the worker’s burst into the room screaming about finding the mutilated remains of three men. Murdered, he claimed, by a bigfoot. Regardless of whether the paranormal was involved or not, there is still the possibility that three men died that night and David owes it to them to find out what really happened.

We follow his investigation over the course of three episodes. The first, “Grabbing at Smoke'' is all about Bigfoot. I’m no expert, but I have read plenty on the topic. So, at this point it’s hard to hit me with something I haven’t already heard before but, they manage to make it both accessible to your average audience and exciting for a guy like me. I’m a mark for this stuff anyway. Just watching people sitting around talking about bigfoot gives me a thrill but here, with all the hushed toned discussions and sinister music lurking in the background, I was in love all over again. You know that feeling you get right before a first kiss? That mixture of excitement and nerves that sits in your chest? I felt that the entire first episode.

It wasn’t until I started the second episode “Spy Rock” that I truly felt scared, and it had nothing to do with a bipedal ape man hiding in the woods. It begins by essentially pulling the rug right out from under the entire first episode with a brief interview of Bob Heironimus, the man who claims to have dressed as Bigfoot for the infamous Patterson/Gimlin film. It just about broke my heart. However, it is an excellent way to put Sasquatch aside for a moment to focus on telling a different story, that of the cannabis farmer. We are given the dark and often bloody history of an area in Northern California forests known as the Emerald Triangle, where cannabis farming has become a way of life. We see how violence has marked the land from the very beginning with colonization, the gold rush, and deforestation. David takes us through the chronology of weed growers (chronicology?) in the area to show us what started with the counterculture, became increasingly violent over time in response to the government war on drugs and the general greed that drives capitalism. This is where my heart began to sink into my stomach. David mentions how eerie it is visiting the towns that surround this area because they are covered with missing posters. It’s no exaggeration, people go into these woods and they disappear forever. I have a friend that has worked on a pot farm and I asked him about it, without mentioning what I had been watching, and this is what he told me, “I got weird vibes in that town. I met some good people but weird vibes. Missing posters everywhere.”

Part of the difficulty in investigating a case this old in an area this bad is explained by David in the third episode, “Real life monsters aren’t huge and hairy with fangs. They’re smiling and friendly, until they’re not. So, I’m attuned to monsters and the more time I spend in the Emerald Triangle, the more I sense a lot of them up here hurting a lot of people. I mean, you go around asking about 3 dead men and the question you get back the most is, which 3 dead men?” As he digs deeper into his investigation, he finds connections to more recent murder cases. We are introduced to a young immigrant woman whose uncle was murdered and the killer never caught. This leads to conversations about race and racism which is when I discovered how cunningly deceptive this series really is. Watching a show entitled Sasquatch, I never expected to be hit with so many serious topics. It’s a story that involves racism, obsession, and people with no regard for human life. Most importantly, it’s a story that is right outside our door where very human monsters exist. That’s what makes this series rise above the usual paranormal doc or the exploitative nature of most true crime stories, it reminds us of the evils that man is capable of. After chasing bigfoot, burnouts, and bad news, David finally gets a possible answer to what occured all those years ago. The truth, it seems, is more awful than we could have imagined and also terrifying in its simplicity. Sometimes we find that the worst thing we can find out in the woods is us.