Gray Henson stars in Bigfoot! A New Musical.
Marc J. Franklin
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Marc J. Franklin
If you happen to’ve pushed in rural areas over the previous few years, you’ve got seemingly seen Bigfoot silhouettes sauntering throughout entrance lawns and on “Gone Squatchin’ ” bumper stickers. (The expression turned common after showing on a trucker hat in a 2012 episode of Animal Planet’s actuality present Discovering Bigfoot.)
However Bigfoot will not cease popping up in every single place: off-Broadway, within the critically acclaimed Bigfoot! A New Musical and as a brand new sensible telephone emoji. Dozens of Bigfoot-themed festivals have taken off in small communities throughout the nation over the previous decade, from the West Virginia Bigfoot Competition to Bigfoot Days in Remer, Minn. to the Whitehall NY Sasquatch Competition to the Jasper Bigfoot Jamboree in Alaska. Half a dozen Bigfoot-themed low-budget horror films are scheduled for a 2026 launch, with such titles as The Final Footprint and Slash Squatch. (This reporter was unaware, when starting this story, that NPR’s Planet Cash plans to launch its first unique board recreation, referred to as “Promote Me A Sasquatch.”) And a wave of alleged Bigfoot sightings in northeast Ohio not too long ago made nationwide information.
A nonetheless from Marq Evans’ 2026 documentary Capturing Bigfoot.
XYZ Movies
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XYZ Movies
“I perceive the fascination with Bigfoot,” says filmmaker Marq Evans, whose documentary Capturing Bigfoot drew rave critiques on the SXSW Movie & TV Competition final month. “It is a thriller. Everyone loves a thriller. Though to some folks, it isn’t a thriller. They’ve seen it; it is confirmed. And there is nothing that you could inform them to say in any other case.”
Evans says Bigfoot thrives in a local weather of disinformation. On-line conspiracy theorists have accused his movie of being AI fiction as a result of it disproves the authenticity of a longstanding piece of proof. Gone are the times when a hoax may very well be perpetuated for many years by movie footage or {a photograph}, says Jessica Landau, who first turned fascinated by Bigfoot as a grad pupil finding out American mythological megafauna. Now an assistant tutorial professor at The College of Chicago’s Committee on Setting, Geography and Urbanization, she says Bigfoot has turn out to be a potent tradition battle image.
“There is a basic mistrust of experience proper now,” Landau says. “And I feel folks actually like doing their very own analysis, having their very own perception methods and never trusting the scientific institution.”
Landau notes that Bigfoot’s present reputation coincided with the rise of President Trump. In 2016, she seen a whole lot of pro-Trump bumper stickers proper by Bigfoot ones on vans in rural Kentucky.
“I feel that Bigfoot does have this attraction in rural white communities,” she says, including that regional variations embody the Florida Skunk Ape, the Woodbooger of Virginia, and the Ohio Grass Man. Usually, she says they’re adopted as symbols of native pleasure in locations that really feel politically and culturally ignored. Sightings, just like the latest spate in northeast Ohio, carry consideration and a sense of significance.
“Nearly all of Bigfoot sightings are literally on state parks, that are usually smaller, usually with much less wilderness,” Landau says. “And maybe not so curiously, a whole lot of Bigfoot sightings are by people who find themselves actively going out to seek out Bigfoot.”
An individual dressed as Bigfoot makes their manner by means of Boston’s Again Bay neighborhood throughout a blizzard in January 2015.
Kayana Szymczak/Getty Photographs
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Kayana Szymczak/Getty Photographs
One among them is a self-styled investigator who not too long ago appeared on the Bigfoot Society podcast to speak in regards to the sightings in Ohio, the place he lives. “I inform everybody they allow us to see them,” Glenn Adkins mentioned.
Maybe they should. If a Bigfoot saunters by means of a forest and nobody sees it, does it actually exist?
