SASQUATCH. I imagined a collective groan when trailers for Hulu s
Sasquatch rolled across screens on the North Coast. Another exploitative, sensationalist documentary on the Emerald Triangle to make a buck off a bunch of curious outsiders, great.
That wouldn t be unfair, given the impact of
Murder Mountain. We re a proud and insular bunch, not necessarily unfriendly to outsiders but certainly to the misconceptions that breed outside of the redwood curtain.
I didn t watch
Murder Mountain and, unlike this column s regular writer, I have largely steered clear of the true crime/documentary boom of the streaming age. I enjoyed the podcast Serial, an honest exploration of the journalistic process, a messy, ambiguous journey fraught with uncertainty. My few other forays into the contemporary genre
Westword staff writer stars in a three-part Hulu docu-series,
Sasquatch, which started streaming on 4/20 and not by coincidence.
Did Bigfoot kill three Mexicans on a pot farm in Mendocino County in 1993? That s the question Holthouse, who now lives in New Mexico, set out to answer when he returned to a northern California marijuana grow operation where he d worked with a buddy at the age of 23. Whether he answers that question turns out to be beside the point. The project reads like a distillation of Holthouse s life and career, in which his most notable piece of work (so far) was Stalking the Bogeyman, a recounting of being sexually assaulted at the age of seven and confronting his attacker, whom he d planned to shoot and kill.