(Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a new series where the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching while social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.)
The Series: Sasquatch
Where You Can Stream It: Hulu
The Pitch: While working on a weed farm in Northern California in the early 1990s, David Holthouse witnessed a fellow employee tell an unbelievable story: according to the guy, multiple people on the farm where they worked had been ripped limb from limb, and Bigfoot was to blame. Decades later, Holthouse (now an investigative journalist) sets out to get to the bottom of that story and find out what really happened in those woods all those years ago.
Why It’s Essential Viewing: Over the past few years, I’ve gotten increasingly interested in deep-dive stories that follow journalists as they sift through a unique setting or situation in an attempt to get to the bottom of a mystery. Podcasts like Wind of Change and this episode of Reply All have done it very well lately, but in the realm of TV, I haven’t seen anything recently that has scratched this specific itch quite as well as Sasquatch.
If you don’t believe in Bigfoot, you’re in good company: Holthouse himself is a skeptic, too. But three deaths really did occur in the woods when he was there, and the gruesome nature of those deaths point to a huge creature as the culprit. So what really happened? While Sasquatch does touch on the history of Bigfoot and interviews many “experts” in that world (including a guy named Ghostdance, who is quite a character), it also gets into the history of the cannabis industry and why the specific area of Northern California may be the best place in the world to grow it. Unfortunately, that also makes it pretty damn dangerous, and over the course of the investigation, Holthouse gets himself into some hairy situations (I swear I did not intend that to be a Bigfoot pun) and learns about even more murders that happened in that area – a place that does not take kindly to outsiders coming in and kicking up dust on a quest for truth.
Blissfully, this show is only three episodes long, which is the perfect length to tell its story effectively and efficiently without stretching things out like so many true crime documentaries do. I was completely captivated for the entire thing, and my wife and I burned through all three episodes in an afternoon. I recommend this to anyone who loves a good mystery, but I also sincerely hope that aspiring true crime filmmakers watch this and learn the right lessons from it.
The post The Quarantine Stream: ‘Sasquatch’ Heads Into the Woods to Find the Truth Behind a Triple Homicide appeared first on /Film.