Bigfoot documentaries: a 1958 newspaper column gave the legend its name

Bigfoot is a giant, hairy, ape-like creature said to live in the forests of North America. No scientific test has turned up an animal behind it. A 2014 study led by Bryan Sykes of Oxford University ran DNA tests on hair samples sent in as Bigfoot, Yeti and similar creatures, and every one matched a known animal, mostly bears. Sykes added that the result does not rule out a future find.

The name is a piece of newspaper history. In August 1958 a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew found large footprints along Bluff Creek Road in northern California. Loggers called whatever made them "Big Foot", and that October the Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli shortened it to one word. Wire services carried it across the country. Ray Wallace, a logging contractor, died in 2002, and his family then said he had made the tracks with 16-inch carved wooden feet.

Filmmakers have been working with the legend ever since. The films below are mostly documentaries, plus a few features that show how the legend was sold. Relay lists more than 250 films and series tagged Bigfoot or Sasquatch, and each film below has a story of its own.

What makes a Bigfoot documentary

• A place. Most of these films are tied to a town, a forest or a mountain range where the sightings began.
• Witnesses, not proof. The evidence is footprints, interviews and thermal images, and the better films say so.
• A believer at the center. Someone has spent years looking, and the film follows what that costs them.
• A name. "Sasquatch" is generally traced to J.W. Burns, a teacher in British Columbia, who used it in a 1929 magazine article, from a word in the Halkomelem language that roughly means "hairy man".

8 Bigfoot documentaries and films to watch

Boggy Creek Monster (2016)

Seth Breedlove, a documentary filmmaker, made this for Small Town Monsters, and it is the third film in their monster series. It goes back to Fouke, Arkansas, the home of the Fouke Monster, a three-toed creature at the center of the 1972 horror film The Legend of Boggy Creek. That film opens with the words "This is a true story", and Daily Variety reported in 1974 that it had earned over $22 million.

Breedlove draws on The Beast of Boggy Creek, a 2012 book by Lyle Blackburn, who narrates and co-produced. A Kickstarter campaign raised $17,000 against a $9,000 goal. Breedlove has said he is unsure the creature is real, but thinks people saw something in those woods that a hoax or a misidentification does not explain.

Documentary

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On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Search (2019)

Breedlove also directed, wrote and narrated On the Trail of Bigfoot, a six-episode series filmed across fourteen states in 2018. It follows Bigfoot reports from the 1800s to the present, with more than twenty interviews with witnesses, investigators and researchers.

The evidence it lays out includes footprint casts, hair samples, recorded sounds and purported video. For a first film on the subject, the series gives a wide map of where the reports come from and who has collected them.

Documentary

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In Search of the Port Chatham Hairy Man (2019)

Port Chatham is an abandoned settlement on the southern tip of Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. A cannery was built there around 1900, and the post office closed in 1950. Alutiiq residents, the Native people of the region, called the creature the Nantiinaq, which means roughly "half man, half beast". In 1905 the cannery supervisor reported that Native workers left because of "something" in the forest. They returned the following year.

The film follows a 2018 expedition by Extreme Expeditions Northwest. Thermal cameras recorded a two-legged figure with a large head and no neck, and the consultant Larry Baxter, a retired Homer police officer, said he did not know what it was. The story is a reminder that the legend did not start in 1950s California.

Documentary

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Big Fur (2020)

Dan Wayne directed this portrait of Ken Walker, a world champion taxidermist from Alberta, Canada. Walker wants to find Bigfoot, and if he cannot, he will build one: a life-size Sasquatch model based on the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed a figure walking at Bluff Creek on October 20, 1967. The film runs about a minute, is among the best-known pieces of Bigfoot evidence, and experts remain divided on it.

Big Fur premiered at the Slamdance festival in January 2020. Reviewers say it moves between taxidermy history, Sasquatch lore and the strain Walker's obsession puts on his family, and that it treats belief seriously rather than mocking it.

Documentary

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The Legend of Bigfoot (1976)

Harry Winer directed this pseudo-documentary, which mixes staged footage with purported real encounters. Ivan Marx, an animal tracker, narrates and appears on screen with his wife, Peggy. He presents it as the culmination of ten years of research.

It ends on footage of a young Bigfoot in a stream, and Marx calls the creature benevolent and mostly vegetarian. Reviewers criticize the poor quality of that footage, and some call it a hoax. It is a record of how Bigfoot was pitched as fact in the 1970s.

Documentary

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Tahoe Joe (2022)

Dillon Brown and Michael Rock play themselves in this found-footage film, searching near Lake Tahoe for a missing person and meeting a local legend. It was made with no script on a tiny budget, and Brown built the Bigfoot suit by hand in his garage.

Dread Central's reviewer called it one of the best Bigfoot films of 2022. It shows how far the legend can be pushed on very little money.

Horror

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Snowbeast (1977)

This made-for-TV film premiered on NBC on April 28, 1977. Herb Wallerstein directed it from a teleplay by Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Psycho and co-created The Outer Limits, a science fiction anthology series. A Colorado ski resort preparing for its 50th anniversary is hit by killings of guests who ski off-piste, and a former Olympic skier, his journalist wife, the resort heir and the sheriff track a creature described as Bigfoot or a Yeti.

Critics have called it a Jaws imitation with a Bigfoot, and one reviewer notes that it has a minor following among horror fans. The cast includes Bo Svenson, Yvette Mimieux, Robert Logan, Clint Walker and Sylvia Sidney.

Horror

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Curse of Bigfoot (1975)

This is an expanded version of an earlier low-budget film about a mummy that comes back to life, made by the same director and writer. The original creature is never called Bigfoot. The 1970s wraparound scenes add the link, and the earlier film was later released as Teenagers Battle the Thing.

A class of high school students finds a mummy in a cave, and it wakes. The added scenes tie the older monster film to the Bigfoot legend that was popular at the time. RiffTrax, which records comic commentary tracks over films, released it on demand in 2012.

Horror

Where to go next

• For another legend that filmmakers keep returning to, see Folk horror movies, a genre built on local legends.
• For another creature story with a London setting, see the 1950s London sea monster film Behemoth.