Late in the new Hulu documentary miniseries Sasquatch, anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum puts the cryptid in the context of “wild man in the woods” legends that go back to Gilgamesh. As long as we can remember, there have been humanoid manifestations of our fears of the unknown, and the unknowable hostility of nature, haunting the edges of our vision.
Sasquatch begins with freelance journalist David Holthouse trying to track down the truth behind a cryptic memory. In October, 1993, Holthouse was a wasted youth working on an illegal pot farm in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle. One night, as the crew was packing it in, he overheard another worker telling his boss that he had seen three bodies in a pot field that had been torn apart by a Bigfoot. The guy was so agitated that Holthouse thought he was absolutely sincere in describing what he believed he had seen. After a career of infiltrating white supremacist cells and investigating Mafia murders, Holthouse decided to return to Humbolt County to see if there was any truth to the memory.
As it turns out, Humbolt County is prime Sasquatch territory. The most famous footage of a Bigfoot, the infamous Patterson-Gimlin film, was captured there in 1967. Holthouse interviews Bob Gimlin, who assures him that Bigfoot is a peaceful creature. Then he interviews the guy who claims to have hoaxed Gimlin by dressing up in a homemade Bigfoot costume, even producing the costume itself.
To me, that feels like the biggest scoop in Sasquatch, but Holthouse and director Joshua Rofé have a much bigger story to tell. Humbolt County in the early 1990s was the focus of the Reaganite War on Drugs, and let’s just say there were a lot more likely ways to get killed than by Bigfoot. The Hell’s Angels, for example, controlled the choicest plot of land in what a veteran grower named Ghostdance calls the best climate for growing cannabis in the world. The rural area made famous by back-to-the-land hippies fleeing the harsh vibes of the Bay Area had, by then, descended into an insular, paranoid, and heavily armed community where growers and the California Highway Patrol played high-stakes cat-and-mouse games.
Rofé puts Holthouse, the investigator, in the center of his story, which normally annoys me. In this case, though, I will have to grudgingly admit that it works. Holthouse has a particular kind of anti-charisma. He says that, for some reason, the criminals and “monsters” he has written about in his career have opened up to him, because they think he’s as crooked as they are. The process of investigating the mystery, in which Holthouse has numerous late-night phone calls and clandestine meetings in the parking lot of a Humbolt sports bar, takes up the bulk of the three episodes. That’s probably inevitable, because Holthouse has very little to go on. He doesn’t even have a body, nor did he ever see a body. None of the murders in the Emerald Triangle he can confirm happened match the facts of his memory. Holthouse is mostly chasing dead ends — right up until he suddenly isn’t.
Sasquatch definitely suffers from the dreaded Streaming Docuseries Bloat Syndrome (SDBS), but the two-pronged dive into weirdo cryptid obsessives and the California criminal underworld is creepier than your usual true crime eyebrow-raiser. If nothing else, it proves that the nuts and bolts of journalism can make for compelling TV.
