The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972): Part Two.

In Part One of our Two Part look at Charles B. Pierce’s The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), we took a deep dive into the lore and first hand accounts that helped inspire Pierce to make a film about the Fouke Monster, a mysterious Bigfoot-like creature purported to lurk in the swamps of southwest Arkansas.

And as the resulting film played out, how audiences weren’t really sure where Earl Smith’s script ended and the oral recollecting began as these very same locals narrated several dramatic reenactments of their own harrowing encounters with some truly fascinating results:

Willie Smith (playing himself) soon learned his lesson for doubting the creature's existence; John Hixon saw it jump a fence and ramble across his yard; and the beast killed two of John Oates' prized hogs. And when Fred Crabtree saw it bathing itself in a creek, he couldn't bring himself to shoot the thing because he thought it might be a man. 

Later that same day, his brother James also caught a glimpse of the creature roaming the woods.

Another night, it prowled around the Searcy house, scaring the hell out of the womenfolk trapped inside, where they watched and listened, horrified, to the strange grunting noises the creature made as it circled ever closer and closer to their house until the attack culminated with the monster scaring the family cat to death!

As these sightings of the beast of Boggy Creek continued, the testimonials kept piling up, too, until, one day, a young hunter stumbled upon the creature, who fired off several rounds, apparently wounding the beast. 

And while the monster howled in pain, the boy quickly abandoned his gun, ran for help, and, after changing his soiled britches, gathered up some friends and returned to the spot of the shooting -- but it was too late, the monster was long gone.

However, there was trace evidence left behind as several stout trees had been snapped off or uprooted. Also, a blood trail was found but it led to nothing. And worse yet, in all the excitement, no samples were collected or saved for later analysis.

Thus, as the sightings and encounters continued to mount, a massive search was finally organized to try and flush the thing out. 

But these efforts failed miserably because all the well-trained hunting dogs shied away from the scent and refused to track the creature due to its awful odor (-- one of the few defining characteristics the Fouke Monster did have in common with its acrid Sasquatch cousins).

However, after this organized attempt to catch or kill it fizzled, the creature wasn't spotted again for nearly eight years. To help bridge this gap, the film shifts gears and throttles back for some more nature footage and another extended tour of those marshlands while Pierce, himself, warbles a ballad he concocted about the Booger’s place in the circle of life -- or something. 

Again, this should not work but it totally does.

After, we shift into yet another gear because it’s finally time to hear from the skeptics, who don’t believe the creature really exists.

Old Herb is one such skeptic, and a real cranky one at that. Having lived out in the boonies in a shanty for over twenty years, and having blown part of his foot off with a shotgun in a "boating accident" establishing his bona fides, in all that time Old Herb has never seen this Fouke Monster and thinks it's all a load of bull-twaddle.

Well, Herb, you'd better tell that to the monster because he's back again -- and developed a taste for chicken, apparently, as we watch him run amok inside a chicken coop.

But of all the accounts heard thus far, the hardest evidence of the creature's existence was a trail of strange, three-toed tracks found in a bean field, preserved in plaster by William Kennedy. According to his testimony, Kennedy had never actually seen the creature but always felt uneasy -- like he was being watched, while working in that particular field.

Interviewed by several experts, who ask if he thinks the Fouke Monster could be a Sasquatch, Kennedy doesn't even know what that is. When they explain it to him, he still isn't sure but these experts don't believe there's a connection because a Sasquatch’s footprints are much bigger and have five toes. These same experts also rule out a gorilla or an orangutan.

So what is it then? No one can say for sure. But whatever it was, the sightings continued to escalate as a group of children drag their mother out to see a monster they spotted down by the creek. Of course, she doesn't believe them; but sure enough, there it is and they all flee in screaming terror.

Here, the film notes there seems to be something different about this latest rash of sightings: the creature appears to be growing more belligerent and more brazen in it's attacks; moving out of the bogs and circling ever closer to civilization. 

And after it harasses a group of teenage girls at a slumber party, the narrator theorizes perhaps the creature is the last of its kind, and therefore, must be very lonely (-- and looking for a little nookie, perhaps? Git your hands off’n our wimmenfolk, you dern Kumquatch, you!).

After striking out at the slumber party, the creature takes its frustration out on a couple of tethered dogs by tearing their hides clean off of them. Relating the carnage, the angered owner vows bloody revenge against the creature if he ever runs into it again.

And with that, we finally reach the climax and the film’s showpiece as the creature’s rash behavior culminates with a reenactment of the siege and attack on the Crank house, which was currently the Ford family home.

Like with his later adaptation of the Phantom Killer’s murder spree in The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976), Pierce plays pretty loose with the facts, such as they were reported, when relating this tale.

In his condensed version, the Fords (Garruth, Dees) share the home with the (fabricated) Turner family (O’Brien, Coble), because both men were recently hired to work on a nearby ranch, explaining why they weren’t around and their wives and children were home alone when the first attack occurred.

Hearing the creature lurking about outside, circling the house, those guttural grunts getting closer and closer, the creature eventually makes its way onto the porch. But luckily for those trapped inside, the critter doesn't quite grasp the concept of a door knob and is thwarted.

When the men finally come home, this is enough to scare the intruder off. But it returned the very next night and started probing through the windows.

This time, the men were home, who rounded up their guns and drove it away with a hailstorm of buckshot. They also call in the Sheriff, who dispatches a deputy (Walraven, as himself), but can find no evidence of the creature they described.

Though he assures it was most likely just a cougar, the deputy sees the occupants are truly and genuinely scared. And so, he offers them another shotgun for more protection and promises to return in the morning when the light is better to track down the rogue animal -- whatever it may be.

Thus, as things simmer down, the Fords and Turners settle in for the night. But things don't stay quiet for long when one of the men uses the restroom, allowing the creature to attack him through a window!

After beating it back, the men rush outside, spot the creature with their flashlights, and fire several rounds until it falls out of sight.

Cautiously, they leave the lit porch to try and follow it. Behind them, in the house, the women are needling well past hysterical; and when Bobby Ford tries to quiet them down so he can hear, he's jumped and savaged by the creature!

Here, Pierce makes his one and only tactical blunder, revealing too much, and breaking the film’s spell, as the off-the-rack costume shop origins of his creature were painfully obvious. We can easily see it's just a plain old repurposed gorilla suit.

Worse yet, the eye-holes in the mask are big enough we can clearly see the stuntman who’s wearing it underneath as Ford manages to break away, flee, and crash through the front door to get away from those *ahem* “claws and teeth.”

Once he’s safely clear, Turner opens fire, driving the monster off yet again. Only this time, before it can come back, the families abandon the house, vowing to never return again.

With that, our film then ends with our narrator revisiting his long-abandoned childhood home, where he first heard the creature's mournful howl those many years ago.

What was the creature after that night at the Ford's house, he asks? Who knows for sure. But one thing he is certain of, is that the monster is still out there, somewhere, lurking in the backwaters and creeks around Fouke to this very day.

“I don’t believe in monsters,” said Pierce in an interview with Jack Harp (Alexandria Daily Town Talk, December 3, 1972). “I didn’t much believe in the Fouke creature when I started making the picture. I got about half way through and actually heard him scream and started believing. The more we studied the creature and worked on the movie, the more firm beliefs became that there was something there.”

But Pierce steadfastly refused to ever call the mysterious cryptid a monster. “I think he lives in the Sulphur River bottoms and periodically works his way up Boggy Creek. It is usually in spring and late summer when the Sulphur River is flooding that the creature is sighted.”

The El Dorado Times (February 2, 1972).

In an interview with Daniel Kremer for Filmmaker Magazine (April 17, 2017), Pierce’s daughter, Amanda Squitiero, said of her father, “He really did believe that the Fouke Monster existed, so he thought that the documentary form best suited it. I think he also knew it would be scarier if people had to consider the possible truth of everything."

Kremer would continue on this thread, writing, “To elaborate on the motives behind Pierce’s structural design, the on-camera interviews unfold much like folk stories, giving the film the rich, resonating impact of oral history. Boggy Creek is a cross-genre essay on collective memory and shared experience, and specifically how memory and common experience can unite and forever bind communities. This gives the interspersed horror sequences an unexpected weight. And this notion of oral history and heritage would furnish Pierce with a sense of thematics that pervades all of his work."

“He was colorful, perhaps the best raconteur who ever lived,” said Squitiero. “No one could recount a story like he could. He’d paint a really clear, vivid picture in your mind. And the stories of the making of his films are often just as wild and action-packed as the films themselves. And he had all the wonderment of a child.”

“A lot of people laughed at me while I was making the picture,” said Pierce (Harp, 1972). “But none of them would go into that swamp and spend the night.”

The Shreveport Journal (March 25, 1972).

Filming on The Legend of Boggy Creek took place between October, 1971, and April, 1972. When Pierce finally crawled back out of the swamps and wrapped principal photography, he packed all of his exposed film into the trunk of his car and headed west; destination, a small post-production lab in Burbank, California, for processing, which was owned and operated by Jaime Mendoza-Nava.

The Bolivian born Mendoza-Nava had been scoring films since Fallguy (1962). He initially broke into the industry working for Walt Disney, writing incidental music for The Mickey Mouse Club (1955-1958) and Zorro (1957-1959). He later became the music director for United Productions of America (UPA), providing scores for the Mr. Magoo cartoons.

Jaime Mendoza-Nava. 

Not long after, Mendoza-Nava launched his own independent film post-production company, where he seemed to specialize in providing editing facilities and composing music for regional, independent features; things ranging from Stephen Apostolof’s Orgy of the Dead (1965), Ted V. Mikels’ The Black Klansman (1966) and Russell Doughten’s Iowa-based The Hostage (1967) and Fever Heat (1968). He also scored Allan Silliphant’s notorious 3D skin-flick The Stewardesses (1969), Denis Muren’s The Equinox (1970), and Bernard McEveety's totally unsettling film, The Brotherhood of Satan (1971).

“I didn’t know anybody in LA,” said Pierce (Fangoria, 1997). “But I found [Mendoza-Nava] and told him I had made a movie and needed some help.” With Pierce strapped for cash, Mendoza-Nava settled for what little he had to offer plus a percentage of the film’s potential box-office take.

Pierce would stay in Los Angeles for the entire post-production, assisted by editor Tom Boutross, who had worked on things like The Hideous Sun Demon (1958) and an underappreciated sleaze-noir called Rat Fink (alias Wild and Willing, 1965), where a young sociopath murders his way to a singing career.

And Pierce landed a huge coup when he struck up that deal with Mendoza-Nava, which also netted him a beautiful, rustic, old-timey score for his docudrama, which both grounds the film and provides the glue that holds Pierce’s lofty narrative notions together and pushed it forward whenever it teetered toward schlock -- or even self-parody at times.

Mendoza-Nava also scored both of George Eastman’s films, too, which might’ve given Pierce an in with the composer through Smith. (Again, this will make a lot more sense if you’ve read Part One of our After Action Report.) And the two would stick together through almost the rest of Pierce’s film output.

Pierce also made the right choice when he commissioned Ralph McQuarrie to design his essential poster art, who produced a simple but highly provocative one sheet.

When the film was finished, Pierce shopped The Legend of Boggy Creek around to several second-tier studios, looking for a distribution deal, but found no takers. And so, he returned to Arkansas, where he tried to sell it directly to several local theater chains but was once again rebuffed.

Undaunted, Pierce took the one single answer print of his film and acquired the use of an abandoned 500-seat movie theater in Texarkana. Said Pierce (Fangoria, 1997), “When I got back, I went to the old Paramount Theater … I saw the projectors were still there. So I called the company that owned the theater and asked if I could use it to have a world premiere. And they said, ‘Well, Mr. Pierce, we’ll sure rent you that theater.’”

The Grand Island Independent (September, 1975).

This was a fairly common practice known as Four Walling, which was pioneered by the likes of Kroger Babb -- Mom and Dad (1945) and She Should've Said No (alias The Devil's Weed, alias Wild Weed, (1949), and later used to perfection by the likes of Charles Sellier Jr. and Schick Sunn Classic Pictures, who proved the bane of Siskel and Ebert's existence by releasing films like The Mysterious Monsters (1975), The Outer Space Connection (1975), Beyond Death's Door (1979) and Hangar 18 (1980). And Rudy Ray Moore would do the same thing with the first Dolemite (1975) movie, too.

Basically how it worked was, an independently produced film would move from town to town and theater to theater, using a form of saturation marketing in print, radio and TV that (metaphorically) covered all four walls. Meanwhile, the producer would keep all of the box-office while the theater owners kept all the concessions money for the duration of the run.

But Pierce provided his own theater, which meant he got to keep all of it. And so, after a little clean-up and renovation, Pierce would exhibit the film himself, coaxing family and friends to stand in line for tickets, then go inside, swap out clothes, sneak out the back, and then get in line again to help lure in the curious for his film’s dubious World Premiere.

“I paid $2600 to rent this theater that had been out of business for a year,” said Pierce (The Los Angeles Times, January 7, 1976). “In three weeks, the film grossed $55,000.”

Official RSVP for the Premiere of The Legend of Boggy Creek.

Apparently, at the time, there was only one other print of the film, a slightly defective reject that the lab had thrown in for free. And so, Pierce took that reject print, found another empty theater in Shreveport, Louisiana, and started showing it there, too, where it grossed $45,000 in its first two weeks. And by the end of the sixth week after its premiere, from just those two theaters alone, he’d made back all of his production costs and then some, including a check to Mendoza-Nava for $150,000 for services rendered. And the money kept rolling in.

Thus, two prints turned into ten as Pierce moved the picture from town to town. This success would draw the attention of Joy Houck and Howco International Pictures -- a conglomeration of several southern theater chain owners, who got into the production and distribution business in the 1950s. And since his current distribution plan “consisted of carrying ten prints around in the back of his pick-up truck,” Pierce was open to negotiations.

Pierce (far right) at the premiere with Buddy Ledwell (center, back.)

According to the Wooley interview, Pierce told Houck that he always wanted to be a millionaire. Said Pierce, “I offered to sell him 50-percent interest in Boggy Creek for a million dollars, plus whatever it costs to pay the taxes on it.” By the following Monday morning, Pierce had his check for $1,286,000 “and I still owned half of the film.”

With a generous 50 / 50 split on the profits, Howco agreed to release the film nationally; first in the rural drive-ins and then into urban hard-tops in 1973. Pierce then sold the foreign distribution and TV rights to American International Pictures. Not too bad for a small regional film made by a guy who didn’t know what he was doing -- but apparently did.

 The Shreveport Journal (March 25, 1972).

“You wouldn’t believe how much I didn’t know,” said Pierce (The Los Angeles Times, 1976). “When the camera would break down I would call Gordon Eastman [who loaned him the ancient camera] and over the phone he would help me dismantle it and put it back together. It was amazing. We got all these great reviews for sound and all I did was put a microphone up against a tree and hoped for the best.”

As for the plot, the movie does have a through-line in terms of story, and follows the creature from his first reported sighting in 1954 up to the present. “There was an eight year lull when no one saw or heard the creature,” said Pierce (Harp, 1972). “Then suddenly one night, he reappeared.”

But Pierce always emphasized there were no deviations from the facts. “About 80-percent of the people are playing themselves in this movie. When they did not, the actual person was on the set to authenticate the scene,” said Pierce. “The film shows both pro and con sides to the reports and the conclusion or belief in the Fouke Monster is left up to the audience.”

This worked astonishingly well. As critic Lane Crockett put it for The Shreveport Journal (August 16, 1972), “The actors and non-actors get by without appearing ‘camera conscious’ and, therefore, give the film an unrehearsed look. Wisely, Pierce does not take a stand one way or the other in the documentary. He lets the events speak for themselves and the credibility is left up to the individual viewer.”

“Quite a few people, I think, are going to be surprised at the quality of The Legend of Boggy Creek,” added Jim Montgomery of The Shreveport Times (August 16, 1972). “Pierce has assembled a film of remarkable beauty. His camera sweeps around and through the swamps and hills of the region, capturing the Gothic grandeur of dark forests and capitalizing on the abundant mysteries of the swampy vistas.

“A lush beautiful score by Jaime Mendoza-Nava is a plus factor and the film’s narration by local radio-television personality Vern Stierman is clear and effective. A few touches bordered a little too much on the ‘jest us folks’ syndrome -- most notably the inclusion of two folk songs -- but basically the film is without pretension. That is, it doesn’t try to be bigger than it should be.”

Pierce later revealed that he wanted singer Andy Williams to sing those folk songs written for The Legend of Boggy Creek but he just didn’t have the money. And when another, more affordable singer didn’t pan out, Pierce just recorded it himself as a temp-track but they wound up letting it ride.

But while the film landed well locally, Crockett noted how he openly feared the film would hold little to no appeal outside of the “Ark-La-Tex region.” He needn’t have worried.

The Grand Island Independent (July, 1973).

Glenn Lovell of The Hollywood Reporter (April, 1973) called The Legend of Boggy Creek “an unusual blend of malevolence and melancholia” and was “eminently successful in giving the imagination a good jolt and ultimately celebrating the unfathomable mysteries of nature.”

“As a rule inexpensively made documentaries do not make a very good impression on us,” offered J.C. Huntley for The Monroe Morning World (September 9, 1972). “They are often so colored by the producer’s opinion that you get the feeling you’re watching a propaganda film. The quality of workmanship, because of the low budget, tends to be poor. And the subject matter seldom can maintain interest for very long."

The Northwest Arkansas Times (August 11, 1972).

But Huntley found The Legend of Boggy Creek a refreshing exception to his rule of thumb. “The subject of the film, as probably everybody knows by now, is that of the Fouke Monster. The movie never really works at trying to convince you that there is a monster. It just tells you what a lot of other people believe and say they’ve seen. But as movies of this type go, it’s a lot better than many of its prototypes.”

The film was also able to work some magic on The Palm Beach Post’s Jerry Enniger, too, after its national rollout, who said (March 27, 1973), “No one is likely to confuse The Legend of Boggy Creek with a slick American International horror film or one of the carefully sculpted products from the Hammer group in England. It is, however, an intriguing and at times beautiful movie with perhaps more truth than fantasy about it.

“Going into the theater with this in mind, you won’t be upset or disappointed if you don’t see blood dripping from walls or some unearthly ghoul running up a hill with a blonde hanging over his shoulder,” said Enniger. “Boggy Creek isn’t one of those movies. Even so, it’s engrossing nearly all the time, photographed with incredible sensitivity -- it's hard to believe Pierce had never operated a 35mm motion picture camera before tackling this film, and performed by nonprofessional actors at least adequately.”

Enniger also nailed the key to the film’s success, saying, “Although it is hard to attribute it to any single element of the film, Legend of Boggy Creek is permeated with a sense of anticipation, of tension, of indefinable uneasiness. Not knowing when The Thing will suddenly slip from behind a tree or around a bend in the stream, the viewer finds themselves on the edge of their seat quite frequently.” And on this point I agree with him wholeheartedly.

The Missoulian (August 1, 1973).

“Given the proper mood, everyone enjoys creepy-crawly stories about things that go bump in the night,” said Jim Hoppwood for The Decatur Herald (May 16, 1973). “The Legend of Boggy Creek is the story of the Fouke Monster, a big black hairy three-toed creature who keeps getting shot at when he comes close to people and as a result is slowly developing a nasty disposition.

“Using as actors the people who have encountered the monster, the movie recreates the local legend from the early days when everybody scoffed to more recent times when everybody jumps at the mention of it,” said Hoppwood. “Some stunning photography, excellent editing and a good spooky soundtrack makes this one of the best film explorations of modern monster stories.”

Beverly Duffy of The Cedar Rapids Gazette agreed, saying (July 28, 1973), “The movie spins its yarn in quasi-documentary fashion, with the folks of Fouke re-enacting their encounters with the beast. The documentary is rather one-sided, however, since it assumes from the offset that the monster is flesh and bones reality and accepts without question the reliability of such witnesses. Despite the obvious slant, the picture provides food for both skeptic and believer -- as well as some downright scary moments for both.”

But not all reviews were positive, with some feeling it was disingenuous and a hoax all along and not worth the time or money:

The Kentucky Post (June 6, 1973).

“The Fouke Monster won’t rival Scotland’s Loch Ness creature. It hasn’t the class,” said The Syracuse Herald-Journal’s Joan Vadeboncoeur (August 9, 1973). “Indeed, it may be more like the Cardiff Giant, one of the great hoaxes that happened within our country.” (I’ll leave you all to google that one for yourselves because this write-up is about to collapse under its own weight already.)

“The story is told in the swampy, dreary area in which the monster allegedly roams and it is told by area residents, all unknown, who confirm authenticity with that thick accent that is difficult to fake,” said Vadeboncoeur. “The film works diligently, sometimes successfully, to build its story, only to have it broken by a stupid line or a song that sends moviegoers to the concession stand.”

And in conclusion, she said, “Rural legends are worth countless dollars. Even hoaxes are worth a couple if entertaining. But with a reasonable number of superior films currently playing, Legend of Boggy Creek doesn’t deserve this week’s movie rations.”

Meanwhile, “The Legend of Boggy Creek is not a typical horror thriller -- in fact it is very difficult to figure out what this film’s purpose is,” said Scott Paul of The Valley News (December 15, 1972). “Would a horror movie break in the middle of the story repeatedly with songs? Would a good thriller use a narrator who sets up all of the action much like those used in a Walt Disney wildlife picture? Does a monster film send the audience into uncontrolled laughter throughout the action scenes? Well, this supposedly true story about a hairy human-like creature who terrorizes the Fouke, Arkansas, countryside has all these elements.

 The Cincinnati Post (July 13, 1973).

“At first glance, the film would seem to be just a poorly made thriller, but it can’t be dismissed so easily,” said Paul. “The scenic country scenes are beautiful; however, they do not add to the film as a whole but instead distract from the suspense. As a result of these conflicting elements, the desirable audience suspense is lost and an air of comedy prevails through the movie. So near the end of the story one decides that maybe this isn’t a horror film after all but a satire. And at the film’s conclusion, many in the audience booed it -- but actually it wasn’t that bad if one is looking for a musical-comedy-documentary-satirical-suspense-horror movie.”

And then there’s Fredric Milstein’s review for The Los Angeles Times (December 9, 1972), which started out hopeful but once you got past the first paragraph, the poison pen went to work:

“Charles B. Pierce’s perceptive camera records a gorgeously pastelled sunset, delicately illuminating the Arkansas Bottomland. Jamie-Mendoza-Nava’s music catches the swamp symphony. So begins The Legend of Boggy Creek.” So far so good, right? Well, hold on.

“But Pierce’s story of the Fouke Monster, Arkansas’ answer to Loch Ness, soon degenerates from the documentary it purports to be, to an unsubtle, ludicrous science-fiction thriller, which could have been called The Great Big Furry Thing from the Bog,” said Milstein.

The Boston Globe (July 16, 1973).

“As long as The Thing is merely suggested, as long as we can glance at huge footprints and catch a glimpse of a creature lurking somewhere within that beautifully photographed wilderness -- our skin properly crawls. But when we get a good look at the critter -- and ultimately we see him a lot and realize he’s but an actor in a modified gorilla suit -- things get ridiculous.”

As for Smith’s script, “It rings far more like a trumped up screenplay than fact piece, which begins evocatively and then sinks into a quagmire of cliches.” And with the cast of unknowns, Milstein was particularly vicious, saying, “These hicks are really hicks, insulting stereotypes, unbelievably stupid hillbillies, many of them, alas, playing themselves. They begin as real people, but soon enough they turn into Snuffy, Jughead and Tater.”

Despite -- or in spite of -- the hot and cold critical reaction, The Legend of Boggy Creek did outstanding business wherever it went. It would earn over $22-million in ticket sales, according to Pierce, which put it in the Top-10 in grosses for 1972-73 -- right beside the likes of The Poseidon Adventure, Deep Throat, and Deliverance (all released in 1972).

Not long after Pierce passed away in 2010, his old friend Harry Thomason described Pierce’s affinity for real money -- for cash, as opposed to cashier’s checks or back-end points -- to Phillip Martin (The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 14, 2010). Thomason talked about how he, as part of a team of old neighborhood friends Pierce assembled for the purpose, would make a nightly drive to theaters showing Boggy Creek to collect the receipts. Then, they’d get back to Pierce’s house, and they’d dump the loot on the floor. Calf-high in cash, they knew they had a hit.

And with the film's financial success, others were quick to follow, inspiring a rash of exploitative films and pseudo-documentaries on other cryptids that helped fuel the fire of that Bigfoot-Mania sweeping the country at the time -- Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), Sasquatch (1976), The Mysterious Monsters (1975), Creature from Black Lake (1976), and The Legend of Bigfoot (1975), but none managed to capture the alchemy Pierce achieved both artistically or financially with The Legend of Boggy Creek.

“Pierce’s flair for CinemaScope landscapes recalls both John Ford and Anthony Mann in terms of sheer scale and depth,” said Kemmer (Filmmaker Magazine, April, 2017). “Background history is often literally framed through a foregrounded intimacy. While Ford’s sensibility is informed by his Irish-Catholic upbringing, Pierce’s equally humane sensibility flows mightily from his Arkansas Baptist heritage.”

Pierce's matter-of-fact style, coupled with a keen cinematographer’s eye, and a knack for cagey staging in the reenactments, somehow, puts the hypno-whammy on your brain, making even the most jaded viewer actually believe this stuff is not only possible but plausible.

Helping things out immensely was the authoritative stamp of the narrator played by Vern Stierman. After serving in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, Stierman landed a job as an announcer with KTBS Radio out of Shreveport. He would switch to TV in 1957, working for KTAL as an on-air personality and weatherman until 1977, where he first crossed paths with Pierce. And he equals the likes of John Facenda and Brad Crandall when it comes to painting a verbal picture on screen.

Right from the beginning, the film's opening sequence really grabs you and sets the tone, as you watch the young boy (played by Pierce’s son, Charles Jr.) running through the tall brush and weeds, where he stops -- ever so suddenly -- to peer back to make sure nothing was following him.

The scene, perhaps inspired by Johnny Maple's encounter with the Marion County Monster, was brilliantly realized. And with Pierce’s visuals, Boutross’ editing, and Mendoza-Nava’s ominous soundtrack wheedling into your brain, you suddenly find yourself urging the kid to keep moving; and faster at that, because you're feeling just as exposed as he is when the boy gets hung up on a fence.

For despite being out in the open country, the atmosphere of dread is as thick as the chorus of mosquitoes drowning out the soundtrack. And as the camera teases you along, keeping the boy in frame to the left, just so, it appears he's never quite out of danger and something could loom into frame from the right and overtake him at any second.

This. This is where The Legend of Boggy Creek excels in its visual storytelling, keeping the actual sightings to nothing more than brief or obscured glimpses -- or nothing at all, with just the threat of it lingering in the air or its screams piercing the night. And that’s why, for me at least, the film kinda falls apart in the third act when it moves away from Pierce’s strengths as a filmmaker and exposes his weaknesses, as we shift from a documentary to pure exploitation film with the attack and siege on the Ford house. 

When news of the film first broke back in early 1972, Pierce flat-out said in the McKenzie interview that they would be staging the scenes and reenactments that called for the monster with a man in a gorilla suit. But Pierce insisted they would only be using the shadow of the monster or keep it to brief glimpses. And this he (wisely) did, until the very end.

“Once we got to the ending, I knew we had to do something for some kind of payoff,” said Pierce (Fangoria, 1997). “So we ordered a gorilla suit from some costume house in Los Angeles, and I went to the five-and-dime store and bought a bunch of old wigs; and we cut ‘em into pieces and sewed ‘em all over the top of the gorilla’s head, and that was it.”

(L-R) Keith Crabtree and Charles B. Pierce.

From a technical stand-point, the climax is sound enough -- and even has a few suspenseful turns; but the actors can’t quite pull it off. And then it’s all nearly undone completely with that lingering shot on the shoddy gorilla costume worn by a clearly visible Keith Crabtree.

“In Fouke, there’s still underlying tension about this creature,” said Smith (The Miami News, March 24, 1973). “Whenever (Keith) was in this suit, we had to post guards on either end of the road. Otherwise, these farmers come through in their pickups -- and everyone’s got a shotgun beside his seat -- and would’ve shot him.”

The Palm Beach Post (March 23, 1984).

Somewhat ironically, Pierce would resolve this issue with a much better creature costume in the long awaited sequel, Boggy Creek II: The Legend Continues (alias The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, 1984), but his attempt to recapture the oral history / documentarian vibe of the original falls flat as the narrative centers instead on a college professor (Pierce) and his students heading out into the wilderness to prove once and for all the creature exists, makes the whole thing pretty risible. (And we'll be taking an equally in depth look at the film later this month, so, stay tuned for a return trip to Fouke, Fellow Programs.)

It should also be noted that Pierce had nothing to do with Tom Moore’s Return to Boggy Creek (1977), which boasted both Dana Plato and Dawn Wells and a less belligerent monster doing good deeds.

However, Pierce did recapture some of that magic with The Town that Dreaded Sundown, which was based on another local legend -- though it was less a documentary and more of a police procedural but no less effective. And then he completed his southern-fried horror trilogy with the equally fulfilling The Evictors (1979) for American International Pictures.

All told, Pierce parlayed the financial success of The Legend of Boggy Creek into building his own studio in Shreveport and producing and directing about a half-dozen regional features in total. Most were elegiac westerns like Winterhawk (1974), The Winds of Autumn (1976) and Grayeagle (1977); but there was some Hicksploitation, too, with Bootleggers (1974).

One should also never forget his notorious historical epic, The Norseman (1978) -- how could you if you ever saw it, where a group of vikings led by Thorvold (Lee Majors) and Ragnar (Cornel Wilde) reach the New World and make war with the natives, which, upon reflection, really comes off as a feature length version of one of those old “Less Filling, Tastes Great” Miller Lite All-Star beer commercials dressed up in horned helmets and furs.

Circling back to The Legend of Boggy Creek, for those who were not there to partake in it, I cannot stress enough how big Bigfoot-mania was back in the 1970s. It walked so all the 21st century stuff of Squatches and tree-knocking could run.

To make it even more clear, if you’ll pardon a personal anecdote, when Star Wars (1977) first came out, me and my friends were ecstatic because we were under the mistaken assumption from the previews, posters, and comic books that Chewbacca was a Space Bigfoot; and dare I say, a little disappointed when we found out he was just a Wookie. 

And a big contributing factor to all of this mass-cryptid psychosis was the surprising box-office success of The Legend of Boggy Creek, which literally came out of nowhere.

One of the smartest things Pierce did was to leave it up to the audience to decide whether the Boggy Creek Monster was real or not. And in doing so, kept the monster footage quarantined to the flashbacks and reenactments. If he had actually let his “documentary” capture some “actual real-time footage” of the creature, in that gorilla suit, it would have been a disaster and would’ve ruined whatever air-of-authenticity-spell the film put on its audience.

It's a delicate balance but I think we are willing to suspend our disbelief when the creature is shown in the recollections, as they are sourced from memory and lean into an imaginative version of what we think they think they saw. But once you show the same actor in the suit and call it real, well, you wind up with something like the junk Ivan Marx tried to sell in The Legend of Bigfoot.

The Leader Telegram (February 13, 1976).

Personally, I don't need that much convincing when it comes to this crypto-zoological stuff, but I'm just weird that way. I like the idea of cryptids, not necessarily in their actual existence. Don't get me wrong, The Legend of Boggy Creek has plenty of snark value -- and it’s easy enough to snark over the toothless bumpkin and inbred yahoo factor, but coming from a rural background myself I tend to bristle at such notions. (Suck it, Milstein.)

As Pierce told McKinsey in that 1972 interview for the Associated Press, “We intend, under no circumstances, to humiliate these people. We are going to tell it as they tell us.” And I personally think the film overachieves well beyond this threshold.

And that's what you should be hoping for in this type of pseudo-cryptid-documentary of this era. Those scenes where John or Jane Q tells you about how it all started out as just another normal day; and we follow them around for awhile; and then the camera pans on past them -- ever so slightly -- and, WHAMMO! Holy shit! There it is! The creature suddenly comes into focus and is looking right at you.

Sure, you may laugh later, but if you had that little knot of dread in the pit of your stomach right before you got that first glimpse, that is what separates The Legend of Boggy Creek from others of its ilk -- and it and its makers should be commended for it.

Originally posted on December 7, 2002, at 3B Theater.

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972) P&L :: Howco International Pictures / EP: L.W. Ledwell / P: Charles B. Pierce / AP: Earl E. Smith / D: Charles B. Pierce / W: Earl E. Smith / C: Charles B. Pierce / E: Tom Boutross / M: Jaime Mendoza-Nava / S: Vern Stierman, Chuck Pierce Jr., William Stumpp, Willie E. Smith, John P. Hixon, Louise Searcy