The Legend of Boggy Creek

The movie that started the Bigfoot craze of the 1970s

The Legend of Boggy Creek

A low budget horror film from the Texarkana area serves as an ethnographic document of a time gone by

One sad thing about the movie industry is that it's often more about who's more well-connected than who's more talente. As a result, many complete hacks head up mammoth hundred-million dollar projects. Meanwhile, many great talents turn out films in relative obscurity.

Charles B. Pierce was one of the latter. Like Herk Harvey (the Kansas based director of Carnival of Souls) before him, Pierce worked in the middle of the U.S., producing remarkably creative work with what funds they could raise through investmen by local businessmen.

The Legend of Boggy Creek was made for about $165,000 but grossed over $25 million making it one of the top 10 films of 1973, and one of the most successful independent features of all time.

The plot concerns alleged sightings of the supposedly real-life Fouke Monster, a bigfoot like creature named after Fouke Arkansas, the town nearest most of the sightings. And while The Legend of Boggy Creek is almost documentary in style, it's not a mockumentary, or even a pseudo-documentary - it features the actual people who claim to have seen the creature playing themselves in scenes recreating events on the actual locations. The film is more like part nature documentary, part docudrama.

Like Jaws it barely shows the creature, which probably accounts for it's MPAA "G" rating. But similar to Jaws, this less-is-more approach makes the film far more effective than would lingering shots of a guy in a gorilla mask. And because of it's effectiveness it helped kick off a Bigfoot craze of the 1970s that exceeded the Yeti craze of the 1950s. This film alone spawned a raft of imitators, rip-offs, and sequels.

By casting local Arkansas residents this movie is strangely akin to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its (perhaps unintended) ethnographic-like examination of the last vestiges of the rural South. Before factory farms, strip malls, Walmarts, shrinking wild areas, and endless economic recessions transformed the landscape forever.

The Good:

• gives a good idea of the region's actual geography and residents
• authentic redneck dialect

The Bad:

• heavy-handed narration by the director
• groan inducing back-to-the-land hippie folk songs
• a bit slow by modern standards

The Verdict: **1/2