Highway 62

As I’d mentioned in my recent essay on DAY OF THE DEAD, one of the reasons that it scared me so was the grounded reality of the piece. It was documentary horror. THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, for all intents and purposes was a documentary. Watch it today and you could call it a little slice of social history of the early Seventies in rural Arkansas. Authenticity dripped off of every frame like the everpresent Spanish Moss in the bottoms.

These were real people, not movie stars, not even actors. Not an ounce of slickness amongst the whole lot of them, from the bean farmer who puzzled over the strange tracks in his fallow fields to the self-assured sixteen-year-old who checked his traplines before heading off to school in the mornings. Semi-toothless elders dispense authority from around the stove in the general store while kids run around the swampland all on their own. Talk about alien. Look at that from where you stand in the late Naughties. You couldn’t pay people to be this dowdy and uncool, could you?



Like I said, authentic. I knew it even at the tender age of ten (which would be in 1977, y’all). These folks dressed like the people in my parent’s scrapbooks, with a few touches of bright polyester here and there, dabs of paint brightening the muted 16mm-bleached colors.

So if the people were real, well then, it only stood to reason that the Monster was real too, right? Okay, maybe not the smartest connection to make, but you have to understand, these were different times. Having survived the Age of Aquarius and America Under Siege (the SLA was indeed coming for your children, mister and missus America), people were hungry for some escape. And some of that came in a wholehearted crazy embrace of all kinds of borderline superstition and interest in paranormal phenomena. Books about Bigfoot and Nessie were easy to get from any library. And UFOs. Don’t get me started on my earnest and heartfelt desire to see a UFO. Or a flock of ‘em.

Now, today, I suppose we’d call that “Cryptozoology”, but back in the day, we didn’t have any fancy words for it. I ate up whatever I could get my hands on in the pages of ARGOSY or in the odd newspaper story that got carried across the AP Wire. Us paranormal geeks even got our own half-hour of television every week. That being IN SEARCH OF, narrated by no less of an authority than Mr. Spock himself. Spock can’t lie, right? No prevarications from this Vulcan. So even though the show (with it’s awesomely cheesy 70s synth theme) was clearly based on “theory and conjecture”, it was The Real Deal. And did I mention that every grocery store, every drugstore, every bookstore had shelves and shelves of shoddy paperbacks that threatened to blow the lid off of the secrets that our everyday world was steeped in? Oh yes. Did I eat that stuff up? Oh yes.

So in this milieu, surrounded by a shadowy half-realized world of monsters and unexplained phenomena, plaster casts that had no rational explanation for their prodigious size and scattered tektites on the desert floor, was me and my imagination. Now it’s one thing to read about a thing that may or may not be real. But it’s quite another to see it, and to see it in motion.

I could convince my rational brain that the monster that I saw in LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK was just a stuntman with a pituitary problem in a suit of matted hair. But something wouldn’t let me. Now whether it the mantle of authority granted by the previously-mentioned film grain (as mobile newscasts often used, not to mention shows like ADAM-12 and EMERGENCY) or the utterly convincing non-performances of the humans involved or that I wanted to believe that there was an eight-foot-tall wild man stalking the wilds of Arkansas, I won’t ever know. Not that I ever wanted to run into said wild man, mind you. He looked like he wouldn’t want to be anyone’s best friend. And who can blame him, after being shot at by hunters and overzealous high-school students.

Hell, I’d have shot him myself, if I’d been through even half of what any those poor folks went through. Plenty of opportunities for isolation terror. Remote houses/farmsteads, sometimes without electricity or other means of immediate communication; strange intruders who are both foul-smelling and noisome, growling at all hours; hairy hands reaching through windows and rattling at doorknobs. I swear to God that I just about had a heart attack at the climax of the film, when the Monster reached in and grabbed at a woman’s hair. No blood, no dismemberment, no nothing. Just a tangled mess of coarse black hair and pudgy fingers grabbing. I’m sure it was a rubber hand, now that I think about it. But back then, there’s no amount of convincing that you could have done to make me believe otherwise.

Does it offer the same horror punch that it did when I was ten? I can’t say that it does. However, LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK is a fascinating view of how you can mix the earthly and the hellish in an mundane way, yet still get some chills from it. Does it herald in a new age of horror? Not so sure about that, but it certainly gave some folks a few new tools (though really, subjective camera isn’t anything new, is it?) There’s no fancy camerawork, no special effects as such, just a determination to get the setting right, and then to wring some fear out of it. The more I think of it, it’s an anti-horror movie, none of the usual trappings of horror cinema at play.

LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK is a documentary. And that’s what makes it really, really scary.