Fortean Documentaries

I've been watching Boogeymen: Monsters Among Us on Prime which isn't as bad as its title and theme music suggests. It covers a whole range of cryptids - Bigfoot, Nessie and other lake monsters, The Yowie, Jersey Devil etc to some less well-known ones and has a fairly balanced mix of witnesses, believers and non-believers.
 
BBC Scotland produced this documentary on the early days of television, when the Web was just one year old!

I had never seen it before tonight. Is it Fortean? It contains many tantalising hints that in watching the development of this technology, we are viewing the wrong side of the magic carpet. It takes a pro-Baird stance, though there is a weird blurring of the mechanical-electronic issue between his trip to Germany and return, as an unswayed advocate of his own mechanical system and his reappearance, years later - in Australia - as creator of colour television! The burning of the Crystal Palace becomes a key event in this hall of mirrors.

One contributor, at least, dangles the possibility of many more revelations to come. Those do not seem to have come to pass.

Meanwhile, Youtube gives us the chance to see this programme, which contains some astonishing archive footage. :loveu:
 
I'm fussy about the rubbish I watch :)

"The Unwonted Sasquatch", which is on Amazon at the moment (free with prime) is worth your time. It features the lovely Jeff Meldrum amongst others. You'll find a distinct lack of hyperbole, running about, or silly sound effects and music. It's just a good documentary I think, and I guess much of that is down to the way it's been put together. Whether you Believe or not. It has people talking intelligently about the evidence they believe is convincing. Much on gait and foot anatomy.

(I see the latest episode of 'Mysteries and Monsters' on youtube has an interview with the filmmaker, Darcy Weir, but I've not listened to that yet).

Also, I see he's made films about other fortean things like alien abduction. So that will be interesting to see. Because personally I don't really believe people are being abducted by actual aliens (although I'm not saying they're all lying when they say something happened to them). And I expect that film will have the same approach of not really laying out an argument, but rather getting a selection of people to talk on camera. If you see what I mean.
 
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Sure wouldn't the entire story of MH370 make for a brilliant 2hr doco by one of the big boys. Only shortish overviews on f2a currently. Anybody seen a full production around?
 
skinny said:
Grim. Grim.
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Updating that dead link on the Donner Party. Terrible folly.

Here's another doc, Australia 1860, of human endurance and the will to survive in extremis, akin to a journey to another planet sans comms. No lives lost on any of Stuart's 6 ventures through hell.
The book, Mr Stuart's Track by John Bailey, is a highly-recommended companion to this locally produced video. Incidentally, I met and had a long lunch quite by chance with Cyril Dixon, the actor who played the bearded Waramungu warrior that halted Stuart's penultimate and second unsuccessful attempt to cross the Australian continent south to north from Adelaide to near Darwin.
 
Another one for our classic documentary archive. I'm just watching it now. I just found it after doing the usual search on YouTube and I hadn't seen it before.

 
Another one here worth watching, an old Australian documentary. I don't recall the Telly Savalas ghost story, very interesting stuff.

 
So, I finally got around to watching my copy of "The Flatwoods Monster: A Legacy of Fear"....

Small Town Monsters (the company that produced it) has gotten a lot of praise lately. I appreciate what they did, but after watching the doc, I felt it would have been better as a podcast.

The Flatwoods Monster has fascinated me since I was a child and turned a page in a "kids book" only to find this terrifyingly disturbing thing staring back at me. Blew me mind, it did.

This doc, while good (and they do interview the actual witnesses so many years later), was lacking in the visual department and I felt like I was watching an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries after they fired the guy who did the computer graphics.

It's a good doc, don't get me wrong, and it's very important that they actually interviewed the original witnesses, but I still felt it lacking somehow.

They do good research, so I'm looking forward to owning a few other docs by them, but I stand by my original comment that it really could have been a podcast and no one would have cared less for it.
 
MercuryCrest said:
So, I finally got around to watching my copy of "The Flatwoods Monster: A Legacy of Fear"....

Small Town Monsters (the company that produced it) has gotten a lot of praise lately. I appreciate what they did, but after watching the doc, I felt it would have been better as a podcast.

The Flatwoods Monster has fascinated me since I was a child and turned a page in a "kids book" only to find this terrifyingly disturbing thing staring back at me. Blew me mind, it did.

This doc, while good (and they do interview the actual witnesses so many years later), was lacking in the visual department and I felt like I was watching an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries after they fired the guy who did the computer graphics.

It's a good doc, don't get me wrong, and it's very important that they actually interviewed the original witnesses, but I still felt it lacking somehow.

They do good research, so I'm looking forward to owning a few other docs by them, but I stand by my original comment that it really could have been a podcast and no one would have cared less for it.
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I'm a big fan of STM. I think Breedlove is really trying to create something that has the feel of the likes of Unsolved Mysteries and The Legend of Boggy Creek on a tight budget. I think Flatwoods estimated budget was $8000, so I was not expecting CGI. Compare that to the Blurry Photos/Monsters Among Us Kickstarter fund for their Shadows in the Desert Project which was a minimum of $20000. Breedlove is operating on a tiny budget and could make 3 films for that.

I am surprised that he is not investing more into his films as practically every new STM release gets into the Amazon documentary top ten. https://www.horrorsociety.com/2019/02/11/review-small-town-monsters-on-the-trail-of-bigfoot/

I think elevating his documentaries to film rather than a youtube short or podcast is laudable and I think people who are part of his investigations are more likely to take him seriously if he says "I'm making a film..." rather than 'I'm making a podcast..."

Remember a lot of the cases and witnesses are getting on in age. The people will understand a film not so much a podcast.
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Remember a lot of the cases and witnesses are getting on in age. The people will understand a film not so much a podcast.
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I think this is a very important point, along with everything else you've said. I too am a huge fan of the STM releases and feel that they take a non biased look at some of the more odd encounters people have had.
I'm looking forward to the ones they have in the pipeline and would love to see their take on cases like the Kecksburg encounter or the Hopskinville goblins.
 
As ever, with my compulsion to always be behind the rest of popular culture by at least a decade, I am working through Hellier for the first time.
 
Lord Lucan said:
I'm looking forward to the ones they have in the pipeline and would love to see their take on cases like the Kecksburg encounter or the Hopskinville goblins.
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I'd love to see their take on Kecksburg; it's one of my favorites. I just got STM's The Bray Road Beast, so hopefully I'll have time to watch that soon.
 
Tiny Tim - a suitable case for a Fortean documentary if there ever was one! And yes, I'm a fan!
Narrated by Weird Al Yankovic, TINY TIM: KING FOR A DAY is a biographical doc about a musician who is not only well known for hits such as Tip Toe Through The Tulips but for his trail blazing personae that paved the way for other rock stars such as David Bowie, Prince, Iggy Pop and Boy George.
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MrRING said:
Tiny Tim - a suitable case for a Fortean documentary if there ever was one! And yes, I'm a fan!
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He was a very strange man indeed and attracted quite a cult like following. He was very popular here in Australia. If only half the tales about him were true, it makes him a suitable candidate for a doco like this (and who better than Weird Al to narrate it?)

Here is a good podcast on the stranger side of Tiny Tim (there's also material on Dean Martin and others but it makes for fascinating listening):

https://www.stitcher.com/show/dearl...iny-tim-and-the-death-of-santa-claus-58367135
 
Just found another good one the other day, originally broadcast on the brilliant old Discovery Civilisation channel which I think ran from 1999-2006, and was one of the channels which broadcast my old favourite, Ghosthunters (1996-1997).

Scream! (2001)
The upload says:
Broadcast as part of Discovery Civilisation's 'Haunted Week'.
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Coastaljames said:
As ever, with my compulsion to always be behind the rest of popular culture by at least a decade, I am working through Hellier for the first time.
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Same here! And I like it very much. I stumbled on it through Weird Studies podcast. Weird Studies Episode 67: Goblins, Goat-Gods and Gates: On 'Hellier'

I've not seen this, but the description sounds good:
[Review] Bella in the Wych Elm (plus an interview with filmmaker Tom Lee Rutter) | Horrified Magazine - The British Horror Website

BELLA IN THE WYCH ELM [OFFICIAL TRAILER 2017] - YouTube
 
FrKadash said:
I'm just watching episode 01 of this new series, Sasquatch, and so far it's really interesting. Highly recommended!

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/sasquatch-hulu-docuseries-director/

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I'll give this an enthusiastic second. Those who know Bigfoot and cryptid personalities and inside info will find a few treats in here. Just to be clear, the Bigfoot content does veer off on its own path after a short while but the idea of monsters ties it all back together. I can't say the Squatchers came off looking so good, though, but they had an interesting role.
 
Good old-fashioned woo. Why not.
Finally, the mystery of ALL the earth's pyramids SOLVED!!

'ow could we 'ave bin so bloind?!
:yay:
 
Just found this one the other day, there is a good YouTube channel called ''Guildford Ghost'' here, https://www.youtube.com/user/GuildfordGhost/videos
And it looks like this guy is uploading his old home recorded VHS collection to YouTube, which I really love! It might seem a bit nerdy to some lol but it's such a valuable job these guys are doing, this is how we find a good majority of our old fortean documentaries that would have been semi-lost without this effort.

Here's a recent upload from this guy, a Nessie programme I hadn't seen before.

Edit*

Here's another one, I'm pretty sure I watched this when it was originally broadcast on Channel 4 back in 2001.
 
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This is my last of ten days off.

On Netflix I'm watching 'House Of Secrets - The Burari Deaths' mini series. It is about the 11 members of the same family found dead in their house in India.
 
From National Geographic Documentary Films comes the extraordinary love story of intrepid French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died just as explosively as they lived — capturing the most spectacular imagery ever recorded of their greatest passion: volcanoes.
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