Western Wednesday: Bigfoot Exists

Western Wednesday is a weekly tribute to six-guns, steampunk, and sasquatch.



Eduardo Sánchez, director of The Blair Witch Project, is making a trilogy of Bigfoot films starting with one called Exists. According to Variety, Sanchez will start filming in October and the movie's about "a group of twentysomethings who take a trip to a cabin deep in the wooded wilderness and are methodically hunted by a Bigfoot-like beast."

Sánchez compares the movie to The Legend of Boggy Creek (which isn't as bad a thing as you might think, if only Exists can be half as weird and insane as that movie) and says that his goal is to "make Bigfoot scary" again. Weta Workshop is pitching in on the creature's design and Bigfoot will be played by Brian Steele, who's played lots of similar creatures before, from Kothoga in The Relic to the minotaur in Your Highness. He even has experience with this particular character, having played Harry in the Harry and the Hendersons TV show.

Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about any of this. I love Weta, but they're not designing the entire monster, just collaborating on it. And I'm glad they have someone who knows what he's doing to play Bigfoot, but that only gets them so far. The story's going to have to be good, but the logline for it sounds totally cliché.

The reason I started Western Wednesdays was because I'm excited about my Western Bigfoot murder mystery in the upcoming Mondo Sasquatch anthology. Ironically, when the editors of the anthology put out their call for stories, their one criterion for submission was that stories not be "typical Bigfoot-scares-teen-campers tale(s)." There's a reason for that: they've been done to death and no one wants to see another one. I'm withholding judgment until I learn more about Exists, but even though I'd love to see a good Bigfoot movie, I'm not convinced that this is going to be the one.