The Stately Ghosts of England (1965)

Ah, the Sixties, when NBC News somehow deigned to hire – apparently already paranormally inclined – Frank “future The Entity guy” De Felitta to adapt a non-fiction – of a kind - book by Diana Norman about some haunted manors in England.

Because as guy from the Bronx doesn’t exactly scream “stately manor house”, the ensuing documentary is actually carried by Margaret “Miss Marple” Rutherford, her apparently mute husband Stringer Davis, and “clairvoyant” (not space cadet!) Tom Corbett.

So Rutherford and her hangers-on in turn visit three stately manors, all of which clearly can only be filmed in Dutch angles, let some posh twat tell the local ghost story in the tone of often told, well-rehearsed stories, and then begin wandering about the place while an impressive orchestral score swoons. Corbett inevitably sees ghosts (and corrects the number of ghosts from the stories upwards), Rutherford overacts every of the very many reaction shots asked of her while quoting Shakespeare or Byron. All the while Stringer Davis looks on, confused why he’s even there.

In other words, it’s pretty fantastic entertainment for the lover of ghost stories or of the less YouTube sort of posh English ghost hunting – Dame Rutherford certainly won’t measure any magnetic fields or shout at any given spirit person – and the paranormal as cosy entertainment.

For me, as someone who grew up on our German Edgar Wallace adaptations as a focal point of what England is supposed to look and feel like – that is, not at all like the real place – the film provides the additional kick of doing something comparable through the eyes of American De Felitta, with the added frisson of De Felitta actually having some proper British upper class people to act out his fantasies about their country for him.

In short: Skinwalker Ranch (2018)

Most people interested in Fortean phenomena in one way or the other will have heard of the “Skinwalker Ranch”, a property in Utah located in what appears to be located in a hotbed of all manner of strange activity from Navajo-style skin-walkers to poltergeists over UFOs through cattle mutilation – if it’s High Strangeness, people seem to experience it there. If you’ve never heard of the place, have a Wikipedia page.

The place is also known for various attempts to gather data about the occurring phenomena in a scientific manner. Of course, if you believe the people involved – some of which you’ll encounter in Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell’s documentary – the phenomena seemed to purposefully (and rather conveniently, one can’t help but feel) avoid camera lenses and all attempts to measure and understand them, as is such phenomena’s wont.

The documentary itself is a thing of two halves. Large parts of it consist of often very interesting and atmospheric material from a never finished documentary by George Knapp about the place and the surrounding phenomena. These parts are actually wonderful filmmaking, including some rather suggestive material, and while they don’t exactly convince me of the theories of the parties involved, they do certainly convince me that a lot of people have indeed experienced very strange things in the area.

Unfortunately, Knapp’s material, that seems more in the spirit of the better Fortean documentaries of the 70s, is intercut with amateurishly shot footage of the Utah desert in “suggestive” camera angles with Corbell rambling on and on about nothing through a cheap microphone, a couple of interviews that go nowhere at great length, some conspiracy bullshit, and a sit-in on the ranch with its new owner who wants to hide his identity while pontificating about having “a large empire of business interests”, and showing off his watch. Well, and a random cameo by crap pop star Robbie Williams, who, we learn, believes. If you’d cut these scenes out, the whole affair would be 90 minutes of modern folkloric bliss, as it stands, you gotta work for the good stuff here.

In short: Sasquatch (2021)

During the 90s, while “visiting a friend” at a California cannabis farm, future investigative reporter David Holthouse heard a crazy rumour about some people having been murdered by a Sasquatch there.

Now, a couple of decades later, this Hulu true crime miniseries directed by Joshua Rofé and produced by the company of the Duplass brothers follows Holthouse’s attempts to get at the truth behind the crazy story. While certainly not being a bigfoot believer, Holthouse is clearly convinced that there’s something worthwhile to find out here. Turns out he’s right.

Generally, I am not the greatest fan of the true crime genre. In my eyes, large parts of it are sensationalist wallowing in other people’s suffering that all too often also tends to try and squeeze reality into the structure of a dramatic narrative, a shape that simply does not fit. Let’s not even talk about the needy way these things always want to end up on a big reveal of “THE TRUTH”, even if it is actually wild speculation.

There are of course exception to the rule: I have more time for the politically more engaged arm of the genre that tries to seek justice for the marginalized and the ignored. Of course, these, too, can fall into melodrama, but they don’t do so regularly. Shit, it turns out, is bad enough without filmmakers (and writers, and so on), having to make it worse.

There’s another string to the genre too, books and films that use a central crime to explore a whole social and historical place, which tends to be the part of the genre I’m most interested in. As it happens, the series at hand turns out to belong to that area of its genre, using much of its running time on building context. It starts out with something of a potted, localized mini-history of bigfoot hunting most viewers vaguely in touch with that material will probably not find terribly new but then segues into an exploration of the culture of commercial (and at that time illegal) marijuana growers in California, the negative impact the war on drugs had on it (turns out the naively used state violence made the situation much more violent instead of doing anything against drugs), putting Holthouse’s investigation into its proper context.

From time to time, the series does indulge in a bit of melodrama when it comes to the investigation, but mostly, it’s an often highly interesting and – dare I say it – educational dive into a culture and the changes it goes through. That the series also ends up with a not completely implausible sounding working theory it actually calls a theory about that whole bigfoot murder business is certainly another notch in its cap.