The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 18

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It’s a Fouke tale of a monster and the people that it scares.

Pretending to be a documentary, The Legend of Boggy Creek is more of a docudrama based on reported actual events. Surprisingly it’s much scarier than one might assume based on the previews or the synopsis.

Before Viewing

A trailer made up almost entirely of nature shots, while a voice over tells of a creature that lives in the Southern Arkansas woods does not seem like a strong horror film. Fortunately there seems to be a little bit of footage of a shadow crossing by the camera, and a bunch of men stepping out onto their front porch firing shotguns. The narrator repeats the name of the film and then mentions it’s rated ‘G’. Really? Is this going to be scary or silly? Gather ‘round for The Legend of Boggy Creek!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

The town of Fouke, Arkansas. It’s a small town, where many of the people are hunters, and enjoy spending the time on porches chatting with their neighbors. Except that there’s something else that lives in the area along Boggy Creek. Locals call it the Fouke Creature. John Hixon and John Oats share two separate accounts of a creature coming into their farms and disturbing their livestock, including taking a 200 pound hog right over the fence.

For the last 15 years, some hairy creature with three toes on each foot has been visiting the woods around Boggy Creek. Fred Crabtree (Jeff Crabtree) sees something, but is concerned about shooting it, unsure if it was actually a man or not. His uncle James (Buddy Crabtree) had a similar encounter. Mary Beth Searcy (Judy Haltom) and her sister were alone at their house with their mother when they saw the creature outside the window. Their cat was found dead the next morning, apparently untouched and scared to death.

A 13 year old hunter (Phillip Bradley) was in the woods and came right upon the creature. He fired his rifle at it several times which only made it angry. Men from out of state with trained hunting dogs come to Fouke to help search for the monster. The dogs get so scared, they wouldn’t trail the creature. The Narrator, Jim (Vern Stierman, voice; William Stumpp, actor) sympathizes with the creature, feeling it must be scared. The creature then went missing for 8 years.

Young Travis Crabtree takes his boat to bring supplies to a loner, living in the woods, Herb Jones, who tells his story. He doesn’t believe in the monster. Some scientists find tracks in Mr. Kennedy’s (Dennis Lamb) bean field with only three toes. They discuss whether it could be a Sasquatch, gorilla, or perhaps orangutang. None of them have the proper physicality or foot structure.

Bessie Smith (Flo Pierce) gets a hysterical report from her three young children, that they saw the creature on the edge of the woods. She laughs a little and follows them, until it steps out in front of her–scaring them all again. At night Nancy (Robin Raffaelli) and her two friends are having a sleepover when they hear the monster very close to the outside of the trailer. Hysterical, they get a rifle and try to load it, but the creature moves on.

The last portion of the film is about two couples, the Fords and the Turners, who share a house outside town. While the husbands work late, the two women encounter the creature on the front porch. It actually tries to open the front door. The next night it comes back, as the men begin shooting at it from the porch. The constable says it’s only a panther living under the porch, until some large hairy creature grabs Bobby and throws him into the house. He was taken to a Texarkana hospital in shock. Jim revisits the field where he first saw the monster as a child wishing to only hear its cry one more time to be reminded that there is still some wilderness left in the world.

“Fouke is a right pleasant place to live, until the sun goes down.” – Jim, the Narrator

The Legend of Boggy Creek continues an unplanned week of unconventional horror films, following Troll, Heavenly Creatures, and The Meg. The film is presented as a documentary, opening with a title card that lets audiences know that “this is a true story,” and that some of the people portray themselves, in actual locations. It was unheard of for such a film to be made in the early 70s. Other films of the time may have purported to be based on true events (such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Walking Tall, or Macon County Line) but were mostly fictitious. Of course, this film was as well, but had a little more meat on its bones in light of those claims.

This was director Charles B. Pierce’s first directorial outing and one of the first feature-length documentaries; though it is better classified as a docudrama. Documentaries are usually films that present an objective or guided view of events as they happen. The events can be arranged into any order by the filmmaker’s for dramatic purposes, but are (usually) not staged events. Docudramas present elements as they happened for the most part, but can embellish characters and dialogue as well as recreate scenes to fit the narrative. One of the more recent and popular examples of this type of film is The Blair Witch Project. It purports to be an authentic documentary based on found footage of real events in the Burkittsville, MD area, but is a wholly assembled film shot in documentary style. The Legend of Boggy Creek falls somewhere in the middle, since it captures interviews with people claiming to have seen or encountered the creature, while also staging events as potential recreations of encounters.

The legend of the Fouke monster is one of several American cryptids with sightings on the rise from the 1950s. The dramatizations of the creature in the film are all based on reported sightings from as recent as 1971, with the attack of the Ford/Turner house. In the film, the Fouke monster is compared to Sasquatch, also known as Bigfoot, which has its roots in the Pacific Northwest, but there are also reports of similar creatures in Louisiana (Honey Island Swamp monster, and Momo the monster) as well as Florida (the skunk ape). Skeptics point to many of these encounters as being misidentification of some kind of bear, while eyewitnesses swear that creatures they have seen do not resemble any real known animal. The film helped to popularize the field of cryptozoology, which is the study of creatures whose existence is yet to be proven. This also includes creatures, like the Loch Ness and Lake Champlain monsters, the Jersey Devil, and chupacabras.

The interest in unexplained phenomena began to grow in the early 70s along with renewed tales of cryptid sightings, documents like the Patterson–Gimlin film showing a sasquatch walking by a lake, and films such as this one. Coupled with the uptick in conspiracy theories and UFO sightings, film and television productions flocked to make movies and shows that capitalized on the trends. One of the most successful was a TV series hosted by Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy called In Search Of. The show focused on unexplained phenomena from creatures like Bigfoot, to ESP, the mystery of Atlantis, and alien visitors. The hit TV series The Six-Million Dollar Man introduced a bionic Bigfoot in Season 3 (created by aliens to boot), as a way to capitalize on the trend. Kolchak the Night Stalker, was another show that used strange events and creatures as the focus of episodes. But by far the series that most appreciates the stories on cryptids is The X-Files. Two FBI agents search for all manner of strange incidents, focusing on many strange and unexplained sightings  like the one seen here.

Of all the films viewed so far this month on 31 Days of Horror, The Legend of Boggy Creek has more chills per minute (CPM) than any other film. Its use of sound effects, documentary style camera movement, and never fully showing the creature create an eerie and spine-tingling film that will excite audiences, despite its G-rating. It seems weird that a horror film would have such a benign rating. That may be due to the fact that there’s no overt violence or blood, and no nudity or swearing. In fact, this is probably the only G-rated film on 31 Days of Horror this year, discounting of course films that have no rating due to their date of release.

Fans of this film that grew up in the early 70s may recall that this was one of many films that featured heavy-rotation at drive-ins. The most popular films for these open air theaters were usually exploitation and horror films, like the aforementioned Texas Chain Saw Massacre and  Walking Tall, or Black Christmas and I Spit on Your Grave. But also action films like Enter The Dragon or Smokey and the Bandit. Director Charles Pierce directed another one of these docudramas/drive-in hits called The Town That Dreaded Sundown, which was inspired by the events of the Phantom Killer murders in Texarkana, TX, in 1946. A sequel to Boggy Creek would be made later in the decade without Pierce’s input; Return to Boggy Creek (1977). Pierce would return eight years later with Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1985) as an official sequel to this film, starring himself in the lead role, which was not as popular with audiences or fans. There may be no beating the original version of this film. Its innocence and presentation creates the perfect sense of nature documentary and horror film that it is probably unable to be replicated.

Assorted Musings

• The theatrical poster features a silhouetted creature running through shallow water as the sun sets in the distance. The artist for this poster is none other than Ralph McQuarrie, the artist and conceptual designer for the original Star Wars trilogy.
• About half way through the film the soundtrack shifts to a weird musical interlude, featuring songs written by the film’s screenwriter, Earl E. Smith.