Capturing Bigfoot is not the tidy cryptid puff piece the title suggests, and the first teaser, out Friday from XYZ Films, makes that clear. Director Marq Evans has built the film around the most scrutinized sixty seconds of amateur footage ever shot, and around a reel of 16mm film that surfaced decades later.
It opens October 20 in New York, Los Angeles and select theaters, with Prime Video carrying it in the United States and Canada.
Update, October 2: XYZ Films has released the full trailer, a little over two minutes long, ahead of the October 20 opening.
The Sixty Seconds Everyone Has Already Seen
On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot about a minute of film at Bluff Creek in Northern California. The figure in it, nicknamed Patty, walks away from the camera, turns her head, and keeps walking. That is the entire document. It has been enlarged, stabilized, measured and re-measured for nearly sixty years, and the whole modern Bigfoot phenomenon still rests on it.
Evans premiered Capturing Bigfoot at SXSW in March, where it ran 103 minutes. His previous documentary was Claydream, the 2021 portrait of Claymation pioneer Will Vinton losing control of the medium he invented, so a filmmaker drawn to fights over authorship is not wandering into this one by accident. The official synopsis on XYZ Films’ site describes a newly discovered reel of 16mm film that reshapes the story, and a documentary about “family legacy, fractured relationships, and the nature of belief itself.” What the reel contains is the thing the trailer withholds, which is exactly the right call.
Everyone Still Around to Talk Shows Up
The participant list is why this one has teeth. Bob Gimlin, the surviving eyewitness, sits for it. So does Bob Heironimus, the Yakima man who has maintained since 2004, when Greg Long published The Making of Bigfoot, that he was the one inside the suit. Clint Patterson speaks for his father; Roger died in 1972, five years after the shoot, and never got to answer for it himself.
Also on the roster, per XYZ Films: Idaho State anthropologist Jeff Meldrum, whose footprint research is the closest thing the field has to academic cover; effects veteran Bill Munns, who spent years analyzing whether a 1967 suit could have looked like that at all; plus Long, Larry Lund, Vaile Thompson, Sandy Collier and Teresa Brooks. Putting the believer, the skeptic, the accuser and the family in one film is the whole ballgame.
“That footage is one of the most recognizable images in the world, but the people behind it have privately carried its weight for almost sixty years.”
Director Marq Evans, per Dread Central
Why That Release Date Is the Loudest Thing in the Announcement
October 20 is not a generic Halloween-season slot. It is the anniversary, to the day, of the Bluff Creek shoot. A documentary that intends to complicate the most famous frame in cryptozoology is opening on that frame’s own birthday, and the date doubles as National Bigfoot Day. Nobody schedules that by accident.
Horror Has Been Living Off This Reel for Fifty Years
Strip away the cryptozoology and the Patterson-Gimlin film is the original found footage: shaky, degraded, too short, and convincing precisely because it is bad. The Legend of Boggy Creek turned that texture into a 1972 box office phenomenon. Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek sent its doomed couple to the actual Bluff Creek site in 2013. Eduardo Sanchez, who helped invent the modern form with The Blair Witch Project, came back to the woods for Exists a year later. Every one of them is downstream of a minute of 16mm.
Which is what makes a documentary that reopens the source material a genre story rather than a nature-channel one. iHorror has covered the sasquatch beat from both ends, from the Kinderhook Creature to the Washington vacationer who found one at the window, and the thing those stories share is that they all borrow their credibility from Patty.
Capturing Bigfoot is directed by Marq Evans and produced by Tamir Ardon, Evans and Nick Spicer, with Nate Bolotin, Douglas Hamm and Aram Tertzakian executive producing. It arrives October 20.
