002: Wild, Lonely Cries in the Deepwood
The Legend of Boggy Creek / Willow Creek (3,191 words, 13 minutes)
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Roughly half of the continental US was woodland before European settlers arrived. Even up until the late 1800s, maps show the East coast blanketed in broadleaf cover. Over the next few hundred years, trees were felled in line with rampant population growth, canopy making way for new farms and the nascent city sprawl. The amount of tree cover has now stabilised and actually grew an incredibly marginal amount over the last ten years. But this is not the same woodland that existed before. The precise numbers are debated from group to group, but less than ten percent of the current tree cover is old-growth woodland – naturally generated and re-generated forest that has developed undisturbed by human activity. The rest has been planted by us or is worked for logging or is laced with hiking trails or used by society in a hundred other ways. This means that there are both still huge stretches of woodland (about a third of the US is still under tree cover) and a feeling of loss, of this being more managed, less wild land.
These old-growth woodlands are amazing places. In them, complex ecologies have developed over centuries in one fixed space. Trees have become thick with age and support an intricate network of life, from fungi feeding on soil rich with hundreds of years of decaying plant matter to bears or wolves trying their best to avoid human activity. They allow you to dream of something wilder and deeper, of hiking past the logged lands, further, further between trunk and through understory and find the deepwood – wild land where the forest grows and decays to its own rhythms. The woods have always been places of stories and myths in human society, spaces that marked the boundaries of our communities. These are the woodlands of Bigfoot.
‘the birds and beasts are crying / because the sun is dying / and nobody sees the flowers bloom but me’
The Legend of Boggy Creek takes us into one of these forms of American wilderness, leading us down creek and path into ‘wild, swampy country’. Charles B. Pierce funded and directed this very charming film from 1972, a docudrama about The Fouke Monster that loosely meanders around a string of ‘real’ sightings in the early seventies. A true believer will tell you that the Fouke monster is not the same as Bigfoot as he only has three toes, as opposed to the latter’s five, but aside from this detail they are in essence the same: both large, black-fur covered bipedal ape creatures that stride through the wild, wooded spaces of America. But there is a built-in murkiness around the details. He is a cryptid, a creature whose existence is ‘proved’ through anecdote and folklore but is not recognised by science. He lives and moves through the wide expanses of tree-covered swamp land in this rural corner of Arkansas; not the towering redwoods associated with an old-growth forest but an equally un-tamed, un-touched stretch of thick vegetation.
Fouke is a small, relatively non-descript town just over the border from Texas that originally grew around a sawmill. The narration tells us that it has a population of three hundred and fifty (this has now risen to the comparatively metropolitan eight hundred). Pierce’s directorial debut walks us through this little settlement on the edge of the swamplands. There is fine fishing in the rivers and good hunting for beaver, mink, duck and squirrel, among other larger prey. It is a fertile place, full of life, both in the farmed fields and in the woods where deer, wolf, and bobcat prowl. It has ‘several stores, a couple of gas stations, post-office and school’ alongside ‘two cafes, where the menfolk stop by for coffee and conversation’. It is shown as the epitome of a calm rural life - ‘until the sun goes down’.
For a supposed horror, there is such gentleness to this film and its treatment of the area. Place comes before plot, and is really the heart of the film. The pace of it is languid, Vern Stierman’s velvet-voiced narration and Pierce’s camerawork meandering around this place, paddling down from creek to creek, from re-enactment to sighting in a loose, almost anthology-like way.
The film is waterlogged with these moments of creek-bound photography, the camera moving with the animals of the area, tracing the rippling movements of life around this place. The film opens with a calm, confident start (especially considering this is a low-budget debut by Pierce). Beavers, frogs and co. swim among the submerged branches; birds land, take off, land again. A turtle relaxes on a perched branch in the setting sun’s light. This is one of several sections that are lovely, loving meditations on this area, Pierce himself being an Arkansas resident for most of his life. It is such generous, unpretentious photography, with time given to the smallest and calmest of objects and scenes. It gives the film such a beautiful sense of presence, of stillness. Pierce filmed this using a borrowed camera and money loaned from a trucking company, and these humble beginnings can be felt in the film. The cast is made up of the actual local people who claimed to have seen the creature and others he hired from a nearby petrol station. The camera work is noticeably hand-held at times (the film was a direct inspiration for The Blair Witch Project). There is something that feels democratic and human in its photography. It is unassuming and close, watching the minor details of the world but with such an eye for the beauty in these humble spaces. It is attention as warmth, cinematography as love for this changing, watery world.
Woodlands at dusk are places of half-vision; chiaroscuro spaces of fading, blurring lights. This dusk-lit waterscape of branches and reflections seem a natural home for a monster that is mostly half-seen, that emerges and recedes from shadows and folklore. It is typical of the kind of boundary-land that folkloric creatures like this typically inhabit – spaces that are just out of reach of civilisation, close enough to be of concern but still wild: the depths of Loch Ness, the Yeti’s Himalayan passes, Bigfoot’s sprawling North American woodlands. Societies have always had these kinds of monsters that hide in the deep places of the world. They are part of how we define the edges of our civilised spaces, where we decide is other – un-tamed, dangerous, and ours – ordered, understandable.
The good-folk of Fouke, just the most recent wave of colonisation and de-forestation, are unable to penetrate this waterlogged wilderness of the monster – America’s sprawling advance of capital becoming mired in the swamp. It is depicted as an impenetrable, unknowable landscape, a prospect both intriguing and unacceptable to this colonising mindset that has already penetrated so far into his domain.
It feels healthy to have a non-human, in this case an almost anti-human, space; an area that shows a limit to human knowledge, human action, human reach. Truly wild landscapes force you to re-evaluate your importance, to encounter things that are not moulded to your needs and desires, that in their otherness and difficulty force you to define yourself against them. The deepwood of Bigfoot and this swamp-wood surrounding Fouke is still a landscape in its own image, following its own patterns, not yet logged or drained for our convenience, not yet turned into farmland or asphalt.
Apart from the deep spaces of the ocean, essentially all the earth has now been mapped. By the time Pierce was borrowing a friend’s camera and filming the citizens of these waterways, all larger-than-human land-based animals had been seen and named. We know more about the world and all the things that crawl, walk, move and breathe along it than ever before. It is easy to see how a melancholy can come with this, a feeling that each discovery strips some of the mystery out of the world, some idea that the sadness of living in a certain world is equal to the anxiety of living in an uncertain one. This is part of what feels like an elegiac tone watching the film now. You can feel an innocence in its gentle eagerness to watch and listen, to let itself swim among the swamp and sink into belief.
‘Perhaps he dimly wonders why / There is no other such as I / To touch, to love, before I die, / To listen to my lonely cry.’
As monsters go, this one does not seem particularly threatening. For the most part he just ambles about the woodlands and the creeks. Sometimes he stands on the riverbank, half-hidden in bushes with the water flowing by him. Other times he loiters and people-watches on the edges of fields. The film only shows him fighting back after a child stumbles across him in the woods, panics and shoots him. Even after this he never physically hurts people – it is the fear that does them, sending themselves into shock. His most violent acts are stealing a couple of pigs and harassing some chickens. The heaviest condemnation you could go for is that he is a menace to organised agriculture – effectively the threat level of a large, bipedal fox.
Mostly, he just seems lonely; always greeted with hostility, always receding into the woodland, retreating “deeper and deeper into the bottoms, beyond the reach of men. [Where] only the alligator, and wolf, crane, and possum and a thousand other wild creatures heard his occasional lonely cries singing out over his watery domain.” He is a transitional figure, both man-looking and animal, both belonging to the deep swamp lands and repeatedly emerging from the woods, ‘drawn to civilisation like a moth to flame’. This relatively new, encroaching little town of Fouke that appeared in the 1890’s seems like a source of fascination, a series of strange lights that he circles around in the wooded dusk.
He makes me think of this idea, from the NYT: “what disease ecologists call a sylvatic cycle (from the Latin word “sylva,” meaning forest), with the virus circulating endlessly in wild animal populations, if they are large and dense, and spilling back into humans when circumstance allows.” There is something of this natural ebbing and flowing between woodland and civilisation, building strength under the canopy and emerging in the human settlement before retreating to the understory to recuperate and, in time, emerge again. The film is a chronicle of this rhythm of appearance and disappearance, emergence and subsidence, a tidal metric of our symbiotic relationship with the wild.
‘Here the Sulphur river flows, / Rising when the storm cloud blows / And this is where the creature goes, / Safe within a world he knows’
It feels crucial that this hulking creature essentially has the same build as us, just larger and furrier. In his lack of definition, he becomes a holding place for projected anxieties, a moving target around which you wrap any half-formed fears you cook up by yourself in these long, rural nights. It is stressed that he is male, and scenes are set up where it is only two young girls, their mother and a baby alone in the house he is stalking around. In a town that is still overwhelmingly white, it is not hard to see a racial element in this fear of a large, black ‘other’ coming for their town. Of all the things that can be seen in him though, it his wildness that is strongest. This seems to be what upsets the locals so much (remember that the film is based around ‘real’ encounters with the monster) – an idea that there is some part of the landscape out there that can always evade them, that they cannot hunt or farm or control. He is their rejection, an element of the area that undoes the fundamental societal feeling of human superiority.
This is something which is blatantly absent here in the British landscape. My friend asked me the other day what I thought the deadliest animal in the UK was and the proposed answers were a pretty sorry state. Woodsy had the badgers down as the main threats, I went for the humble cow. Neither pack much of a punch in the global killer Top Trumps.
I don’t want more animal attacks in the UK. But the removal of predators in our landscapes has created such a feeling of flatness, such an impression of sterility in our natural spaces. This used to be a landscape of bear, wolf and lynx. Their local extinction has had a range of ecological effects in Britain, but it has also stripped these islands of a lot of their awe, their mystery. We have de-fanged the British landscape, taken away all threat and possibility until it is just a space of people and docile livestock. Wolves, bears, Fouke monsters. Each of these is a reminder of your own vulnerability, working away any technologically driven feeling of dominance. They remind you that you are also part of the world, that it still has some say over you.
And I feel we are still, in some deep, buried place, desperate for this. The closest I have ever got to any Bigfoot-esque excitement was a series of rumours of a large, black cat being sighted near where I grew up. People were adamant they had seen it prowling the heather, melding with the moorland shadows and their own eager fantasy. This kind of Big Cat Mania is pretty typical in the UK. George Monbiot discusses it in his book Feral, where he says that these sighting occur at a rate of 2-4,000 a year without ever throwing up any real proof. He assigns this modern eagerness to see these predatory cats as a kind of call back to evolutionary period where we were more physically vulnerable, a nostalgia for a time before this contemporary moment “at which the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts”. They speak to a desperation to exist in what feels like a living landscape, in dynamic ecological relation. It is intensely difficult to find an area of the British landscape that is not textured by human interference. I think there are parts of you that like the presence of some other power in nature, something to remind you that people are not omnipotent but tender and fallible.
More than this, the belief that there is some un-touched stretch of land with some huge hominid walking over it tantalises you with the idea that there is somewhere we have not had the chance to pollute yet. His size and existence are counterpoints to your own. A belief in him is a belief that your own reach, your own actions, do not span around the globe and infiltrate all the hidden corners of the world.
‘Here beneath the bright blue sky, / No man-smoke blind’s the eagle’s eye / And things that crawl or swim or fly, / feed and breed and live and die’
The Legend of Boggy Creek was a starting point for a wave of Bigfoot cinema; film after film circling this receding, peripheral figure. One of the latest of these is Willow Creek (2013). It is a fairly charmless re-telling, following a couple into the woods. He is a vlogger eager to find Bigfoot and has a habit of lying and refusing to admit when he’s wrong. She is for some reason still with him. The film seems obviously inspired by Pierce’s, from the echoing of the name and subject matter through to its use of found footage. The only real highlight of the film is an eighteen minute or so section towards the end, where the hand-held camera is used to intense, claustrophobic effect.
The opening third works through a similar series of encounters with local people, asking them what they think about Bigfoot. But the overall atmosphere of a warm authenticity in Boggy Creek has gone. Willow Creek feels more cynical, more exploitative, in a very modern way. The town they are in is full of Bigfoot tourist merchandise and marketing. You can get a ‘Bigfoot Burger’, see the mural, go to ‘Bigfoot Books’. In Fouke itself, you can now go to Peavy’s Monster Mart and get yourself Fouke Monster t-shirts, stand and pose for a photograph next to a cardboard cut-out, treat yourself to some of the hundreds of books on the Bigfoots of North America. Individually, the owners of these places are just people trying to make a living from wider public interest in their area, and fair play to them. But collectively they are part of the process wherein wildness is re-cast as a product, becomes a commodity. The hunters of Fouke have never been able to capture their monster. Their dogs refuse to follow him, they have no idea where he might actually be settled. Each time he just moves deeper into the woods, ‘beyond the reach of man’. It seems maddening and terrifying for them, that there is an element of nature that they cannot control, trap, stick in a museum or sell. He is the part of their landscape that they have not been able to ‘reclaim’ yet - that is still stubbornly non-agricultural, non-utile.
Here, this folkloric creature that exists only on the peripheries - always retreating, always ungraspable - has been tied down and translated into marketing slogans, burger combinations, t-shirt decorations. This is where Bigfoot exists, at the intersection of societal development/resource extraction and wild spaces. He is an articulation of a fundamentally elusive idea of nature, a symbol of some un-touched, mythical deepwood that we are drawn to. But no matter how hard you hide, you can always be used to sell things. The creature becomes not something to be in awe or fear of but rather something that you can now control, that you can flick through representations of before choosing your pick. He has been made graspable, tradeable, consumable. Bigfoot is now big business, people’s yearning for wilderness packaged up and marketed back to them.
The end of Boggy Creek’s narration is as lovely as the rest of it:
‘Of course, you may not believe that, or any of this story. You may think the whole thing is a hoax and, that’s your privilege. But if you’re ever driving down in our country along about sundown, keep an eye on the dark woods as you cross the Sulphur river bottoms and you may catch a glimpse of a huge, hairy creature watching you from the shadows. Yes, he’s still here. And you know, I’d almost like to hear that terrible cry again, just to be reminded that there is still a bit of wilderness left, and there are still mysteries that remain unsolved, and strange unexplained noises in the night.’
This is the heart of how Pierce approached this creature and its amphibian home. His film is a loving attempt to re-enchant this natural space, to cut through any cynicism and put some fear and wonder back into a landscape, some un-quantifiable mystery and terror. To feed the pagan part of your soul.
Info:
The Legend of Boggy Creek has recently been remastered in 4k and if you’re going to watch it (you should) I 100% recommend that you go for this version. Pierce’s daughter was able to get hold of the copyright for the film and the quality is so much better than the other versions that are knocking about. I don’t think it’s on any streaming services but you can buy it online easily enough or get it on Blu-Ray. Willow Creek is available on Shudder here in the UK.
In terms of things to read, they’re not the most niche of books but George Monbiot’s Feral and Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places are both brilliant and have shaped a lot of my thinking around these ideas.