There are many things to be worried about these days. Disease. Gun violence. Insurrection. War. And yet if that weren’t enough to weigh on Americans’ minds, Hulu’s latest three-part docuseries introduces another potential threat to our collective safety and well-being: Sasquatch.
Directed by Joshua Rofé (Lorena) and produced by Mark and Jay Duplass (Wild Wild Country), Sasquatch (premiering 4/20—and with good reason) revisits the legend of Bigfoot through the prism of a still-unsolved true crime case. In the fall of 1993, David Holthouse went to work on a cannabis farm in the famed marijuana fields of the Emerald Triangle, a Northern California area comprised of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties. The Emerald Triangle is a remote, mountainous region that’s not easily accessible, and boasts the perfect soil and atmosphere needed to grow excellent crops. It was a lawless land that had been populated first by hippies and then, once the marijuana trade became profitable, by scarier types, and it wasn’t long into Holthouse’s tenure that he had an experience that would haunt him for decades.
One rainy night, while less than completely sober in the house of the farm’s owner, Holthouse watched two men burst in and report the unbelievable: a marijuana deal had gone terribly awry, and three individuals had been massacred. “They’re mangled,” they stated with panicked fear in their eyes. Stranger still, the weed they’d been selling hadn’t been taken, so this wasn’t a rip-off by the transaction’s other partners. What was the explanation for this bizarre calamity? The frightened man was clear: “A Bigfoot killed those guys.”
Given that rumors were rampant throughout the Emerald Triangle about ferocious Sasquatches—who would often scare interlopers away from their stomping grounds—Holthouse was spooked. He kept this secret for the following 25 years, during which he became an investigative journalist who tracked down authentic fiends—including, most famously, the man who had raped him as a child, whom he planned to vengefully execute. Only recently did he finally decide it was time to face his past and hunt down the monster he had heard about back in 1993, thus giving birth to Rofé’s Sasquatch, which follows Holthouse as he tries to find out what happened back on that fateful 1993 evening, and whether the creature is real.
Told over the course of three sharp and entertaining episodes, Rofé’s wacky docuseries benefits from having an expert protagonist to guide us through this wild saga. Holthouse has a casual sensibleness and good humor that makes him instantly likable and trustworthy, and he treats his mission like he would any other journalistic assignment, chasing down leads and doing research to get a sense of both the Emerald Triangle’s longstanding connection to Bigfoot, and its violent narcotics-industry culture. At the same time, he admits that a triple homicide committed by Bigfoot sounds “ridiculous on the face of it,” which lends the proceedings a measure of levity and self-awareness that’s welcome, and helps sell his ensuing inquiry.
Like any good sleuth might, Holthouse begins by going to the seminal Bigfoot source: Bob Gimlin, who along with Roger Patterson made the 1967 film that supposedly depicts Bigfoot traipsing along Bluff Creek in Humboldt County. Gimlin maintains that the footage he and Patterson shot is legitimate, but Holthouse makes sure to juxtapose his claims with commentary from Bob Heironimus, who’s long asserted that he was hired by Gimlin and Patterson to dress up as Bigfoot for that well-known production. The truth about Bigfoot’s existence remains elusive to Holthouse, as do verifiable facts about the triple murder he heard about back in 1993, since there was never a record of the massacre—slain men were often covertly buried by the dealers who ran the Emerald Triangle—much less any formal investigation. In short: Holthouse isn’t even sure if a crime was actually committed, much less that a furry, ancient 10-foot-tall humanoid was involved.
Nonetheless, Holthouse presses onward in his search for hard evidence. What he comes up with are rumors that the victims were Mexican migrants, which help round out his fascinating portrait of the marijuana business in the ’80s and ’90s, when “Back to the Land” hippies who had originally grown marijuana as a means of living naturally off the grid—in defiance of California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) task force—were pushed out by the Hells Angels and other menacing drug-dealer types who shot first and then shot again to make absolutely sure you were dead. Sasquatch revels in the curious goofiness of its material, employing animation to recreate Holthouse’s 1993 memories, as well as interviews with a wide variety of kooky characters, including an Emerald Triangle vet named Ghostdance, an ex-con named Razor, and a local nicknamed Bobo who gives Sasquatch tours to visitors (or so says his T-shirt), refers to the hairy beasts as “Squatchers,” and ominously warns, “Don’t trust them.”
David Holthouse in Sasquatch
HuluAlmost no one Holthouse encounters along his journey is completely trustworthy, considering that his reporting puts him into contact with ever-shadier men and women around Spy Rock Road with ties to a marijuana trade that, even in post-legalization California, is a money-making force to be reckoned with. Eventually, Sasquatch becomes not only a history lesson about the famed beast, but a descent into the darkest corners of the illicit drug world, replete with Holthouse interviewing methheads in cars outside dive bars, and chatting on the phone with potential assassins who are so fearsome, he demands that their names be bleeped out of the docuseries (instead, the person in question is simply referred to as “Alleged Killer”). He also learns of the existence of a Mendocino drug titan known as “Bigfoot” who may have been behind the homicide as payback for the rape of his daughter—thereby intimating that this is a real-world version of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.
Is Sasquatch a primitive creature residing in California’s Redwood forests (as at least one expert claims is a certainty), or is the myth merely a scare-tactic means to an end for the Emerald Triangle’s real monsters? Sasquatch has its own theory, although the fun of Rofé’s playfully intriguing docuseries is that it locates the reality behind the legend without sacrificing any of its tale’s out-there mystery.
