First published in Rue Morgue #48, August 2005
Most people think back on the seventies as that time when theatrics were out, gritty realism was in and the monster in the closet was, more often than not, very human and very disturbed. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre looms large in those recollections, as do other horror flicks featuring household appliances put to ill use by men and women gone horribly mad. But the seventies are seldom remembered for the other monsters, the creatures of the unexplained who used to slink on television in grainy, washed out glimpses, usually from home cameras wielded by amateur hands.
Back in the seventies, the world was overrun with creatures fantastic and strange. Having been whispered to life by a fireside culture, these mysterious monsters eventually came into being through the curious chemistry of Fortean philosophy (which expressed skepticism about scientific explanations) and good old-fashioned hucksterism. Rumours became possible, and possibility became probability in the pseudo science of cryptozoo – the study of hidden animals to practitioners, to everyone else, the sober consideration that fantastic creatures could exist on the earth. The world was changing, and those fireside yarns found a cinematic counterpart in footage from hand-held cameras that, like the stories, remained the product and property of the general public.
Sometime in 1968, two amateur investigators achieved the miraculous. They managed to produce a film depicting a Bigfoot, doubly miraculous because the elusive creature – a giant bipedal ape – was nothing less than the Holy Grail of cryptozoological lore. (And even more astonishing is that, to this day, the footage continues to be topic of hot debate.)
The age of the mysterious monsters had arrived in the warm light of day, opening the door to other possibilities – tales of a sea serpent in the icy waters of a certain Scottish lake, an abominable snowman in the snowbound peaks of the Himalayas, a goat-sucking monster in rural Mexico and even living dinosaurs. The world became suddenly, incredibly stranger, and news reports started coming in of disappearing ships and airplanes in the Atlantic, strange light formations in the night sky, and the suggestion that ancient astronauts had visited the world in the remote past.
Television warmed to the new fad and classic shows like In Search Of, Nova and Mysteries of the Unexplained became overnight sensations. Sold as documentaries, these shows were less concerned with factual science than they were with exploring the idea that the world was strange and frightening, and they did so with a mountain of grainy stills where – like so many Rorschach ink blots – unsettled viewers could project their deepest fears. The mere possibility that there existed things that science could not explain made the world that much more deliciously eerie.
Of course, once the actual scientists took an interest, all the mysteries dissipated like so much hookah pipe smoke. Like an illusion revealed to the audience, the sensationalism that kept the world wonderfully weird was defused and debunked, and once the magic was gone, there was nothing left but the die-hards. The mysterious monsters had drowned in the tide of derision that comes when nightmares are recalled in the light of day.
Sadly, when the monsters died, a lot of possibilities died with them, because few people ever understood that all that bad journalism actually made for some great scares. To this day I am amazed that so few genre filmmakers have cribbed the techniques from those old shows. The few who have – Ed Sanchez and Daniel Myrick for The Blair Witch Project and M. Night Shyamalan for Signs – have shown that those old techniques still work, and work exceedingly well. Because, contrary to popular belief, there is one thing that is scarier than the truth… and that’s the possibility of the truth.