When you think of scary movies, no doubt you first consider the classic players: the ghost, the vampire, the slasher, the kinda creepy rooms, staples. They’re popular for a reason, but this year, I would like to humbly offer an alternative, a creature featured not nearly enough: the humble Bigfoot.
You probably won’t see them in theaters, but the library of Bigfoot horror movies is extensive. The problem is that most of these movies have a piggy bank budget and certainly aren’t getting the word of mouth they deserve, so it’s up to us. Like Patterson and Gimlin, we’ve gone in search of Bigfoot, and we found him just in time. Here are the 5 best Bigfoot horror movies to watch before Halloween.
Willow Creek Is A Found-Footage Bigfoot Adventure
- Rating: 8/10
- Do you get to see Bigfoot: No, but it works
- Can you replace Bigfoot with a bear: No, bears cannot yodel
Willow Creek is a found footage film directed by Bobcat Goldthwait that follows Bigfoot aficionado Jim (Bryce Johnson) and supportive non-believer girlfriend Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) as they try to record evidence of Bigfoot at the site of the Patterson and Gimlin footage, but once they set up camp, they have an intense encounter of their own.
If you’re hesitant about Bigfoot cinema, this is a great movie to get your toes wet because it’s also an excellent slow-burn bit of found footage horror. Instead of jumpscares and gore, this movie delivers mounting, atmospheric dread that builds with every scene. It truly captures the feeling of being deep in the woods, scared and vulnerable, with something intelligent and wild and big watching you.
For a movie that never shows Bigfoot directly, Willow Creek makes you feel he’s there. So many horror movies rely on making you feel unsafe in a cabin in the woods, but cabins have walls, big sturdy wooden walls with windows you can barricade. This movie does the same thing with a tent. Jim and Kelly wake to hear noises outside their tent, knocking on trees, rustling in the bushes, inhuman yelping, and it just builds. For over 15 minutes. Until whatever is out there is close enough to press in on the walls of their tent.
Exists Brings The Fireworks To The Bigfoot ‘Genre’
- Rating: 8/10
- Do you get to see Bigfoot: Yes
- Can you replace Bigfoot with a bear: No way, this Bigfoot is a smarty
Exists is another found footage film, but this one was directed by Eduardo Sánchez, who you might know from The Blair Witch Project. Being directed by found footage royalty does a lot for this movie, but it takes a little bit to find its (big)footing. Exists follows a group of friends as they visit a cabin in the woods so they can do normal young people stuff: setting off fireworks, recording each other going off sick jumps with their bicycles, just young people things.
But something goes wrong on the way. Distracted by his friends trying to set each other on fire in the back seat, driver Matt (Samuel Davis) hits something. They brush it off, but soon after arriving at the cabin, they come face to face with a furious Bigfoot out for revenge. So many horror movies make one huge mistake when they try to do Bigfoot horror: they always set it at night. Something huge lurking in the dark is undeniably scary, but you know what’s worse? Something huge and smart and almost human seeing you in the middle of the day and just running at you. There’s no way you can get away, and this thing is just bearing down.
That’s something Exists does flawlessly. The best scene hands down is when Todd (Roger Edwards) sets off some fireworks to signal Matt’s uncle that they’re hiding in a nearby camper. You expect something to go wrong. What you don’t expect is Bigfoot to come charging through the smoke before it clears. Todd runs, but you know he’s not getting away.
Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes Expands The ‘Squatch Mythology
- Rating: 7/10
- Do you get to see Bigfoot: Yes, kind of
- Can you replace Bigfoot with a bear: Absolutely not
Lost Cost Tapes, directed by Corey Grant, is kind of the Grave Encounters of Bigfoot movies. Like its haunted counterpart, this is another found footage movie in which a team of hoax hunters get way in over their heads. Instead of a haunted asylum, they’re deep in the woods visiting with a well-known Bigfoot hunter who claims he’s in possession of an actual dead Bigfoot, but that’s not all that’s going on. It turns out, Bigfoot might not be the only thing in the woods. This film endeavors to ask a question the others haven’t: is Bigfoot friend or foe? And if he’s such a friend, then why are all these impossible-to-like characters dropping like flies?
It seems that almost anyone who endeavors to make a Bigfoot movie must sign a contract that states they will try to explain why nobody has found a Bigfoot corpse. Some movies make a point of showing that Bigfoots bury their dead. Others just have them live in extremely remote or overly specific locations like the woods directly outside of one guy’s cabin. Lost Coast Tapes has its own answer for this, partially rooted in actual traditional stories about Bigfoot. This Bigfoot walks in both the spirit world and the real world, an angle that would absolutely work if this movie wasn’t intent on constantly contradicting that.
Lost Coast’s best scene is a draw between every single time these amateur hoax hunters find rampant physical evidence of Bigfoot, from hair and blood embedded in slashes in the cabin wall to the ripe aroma of Bigfoot urine all the way down to a pickled finger from a baby Bigfoot.
Bigfoot Country Will Surprise You (In The Weirdest Ways)
- Rating: 6/10
- Do you get to see Bigfoot: Yes, a little bit
- Can you replace Bigfoot with a bear: Yes, but it’s much funnier that it’s Bigfoot
Bigfoot Country, written and directed by Jason Mills, is the kind of movie you force your friends to watch that gets funnier the longer you look at it. In this Bigfoot adventure, three friends and the worst person you’ve ever met go out into the woods for a camping trip, and Bigfoot is there, and he kind of hunts them. You don’t watch Bigfoot Country because it’s good. You don’t even watch it because you really like Bigfoot. You watch it because it just keeps making the weirdest decisions possible, and you have to stick with it to the end if only to see what happens.
Unlike every other movie on this list, Bigfoot ends Bigfoot Country with a kill count of zero. The real killer in this movie is hubris. When the gang is setting up camp, Bryce (Hans Potter) reveals that instead of bringing bear bangers, he brought his brother’s old gun. And almost no ammo. That gun makes a few appearances, but its most notable moment is about two-thirds of the way through the movie after the group has been harassed and attacked by Bigfoot for two nights in a row.
Carly (Brooke Walker) is with Kiera (Kiana Passmore). They’re scared and alone and trying to find their missing friends, but she has the gun. What she does not have is trigger discipline. Startled by Sean (Michael Strickland) appearing suddenly behind her, she accidentally shoots Kiera in the face. It’s genuinely a shocking moment that tells us that perhaps the real Bigfoot is gun violence.
Bigfoot: The Movie Does Not Quite Earn Its Bold Title
- Rating: 9/10 for the first 30 minutes; 2/10 for the last 60
- Do you get to see Bigfoot: Yes, almost immediately
- Can you replace Bigfoot with a bear: No, bears respect privacy
Bigfoot: The Movie was directed by Jared Show and partially funded on Kickstarter. The plot is pretty straightforward: the mayor of Ellwood City, PA is trying to make a secret Bigfoot zoo on his private land, but Bigfoot escapes. While on the lamb, Bigfoot kills beloved friend and cornhole champion Daryl (Bill Crawford), and it’s up to his friends to avenge him.
I do not know if this was intended as a comedy or not, but the first 30 minutes of this movie had me laughing more than any other Bigfoot film. It’s kind of a low-budget Tucker and Dale vs. Evil mixed with off-brand Letterkenny, at least for the first half hour. After that, it sort of devolves into strange and uncomfortable tangent scenes of characters drinking at bars and going on weirdly long dates while intermittently cutting to Bigfoot battle prep.
There are a few points where it feels like this movie forgets it’s a movie. It’s like someone told the writers to make sure to show the characters have their own lives, and they took that very literally. My favorite example of this is when Burl (Jared Snow) gets a pain in his side, so he goes to the doctor and learns he has a kidney stone. It’s only a two-minute scene, but it has virtually no connection to anything else going on at the time, and then you spend the rest of the movie wondering why that scene was even there. It’s the weirdest Chekhov’s gun in history, and it ends up having zero narrative significance. He passes the kidney stone in a parking lot, and that’s pretty much it.
You can stream the above movies on Tubi for free, and you can see Bigfoot on grainy videos filmed in the woods (but really we should all just leave him alone).
