Cryptomundo
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Directed by renegade provocateur Bobcat Goldthwaite, set in the wilderness of Northern California and centered around Sasquatch, the silliest of modern-day monsters, Willow Creek turns out to be a truly frightening, intensely unforgiving experience. The fact that it accomplishes this, not by applying a new twist to the found-footage cliché, but by polishing the cliché with gripping effectiveness makes this video-on-demand thriller one of the “finds” of the decade.

I’ll admit, I’ve never seen any of Goldthwaite’s previous movies. The former stand-up comic has a penchant for subject matter so off-putting, at least on paper, that I simply haven’t wanted to go there. Autoerotic asphyxiation; canine fellatio; a depressed alcoholic clown. But since I’m a Northwest kid with an affection for the loopy wilderness legend of Bigfoot, how could I pass on Willow Creek?

The framing device for the film sets us up with a Bigfoot-believing Internet journalist and his non-believing girlfriend on a trek to the original location of the first, and still disputed, “authentic” footage of a Bigfoot ever recorded. (That was way back in the late ‘60s.) The couple appears to be shooting a feature for an online reality TV show, although the whole thing has the feel of a lark, one the girlfriend puts up with because, as she tells her companion, “I like hanging out with you.”

As the pair interviews townsfolk in the real Humboldt County town of Willow Creek, shoot goofy stand-ups in front of Bigfoot sculptures and sample a pair of Bigfoot submarine sandwiches, the movie cruises forward with an amiable rhythm. Even the camerawork soothes with tripod-solid compositions and lovely summer light, another step-up from the jerky amateurism of the genre.

But our adventurous duo is not professional when it comes to heeding a few ominous warnings. One local tells them Bigfoot is no joke. Another cautions that the wilderness they’re heading into is full of bears and cougars. Later, once they are trundling down a gravel road in the middle of nowhere, they have a nerve-racking encounter with a surly backwoods creep, a potential man-raping tweaker who orders them to get the hell out.

Wiser heads would normally prevail at this point. But instead of heading back to town to buy a few furry Sasquatch tchotchkes from the gift shop, the couple goes all in, backpacking off into the trail-free underbrush. Later that night, awakened in their tent by strange noises, Goldthwaite puts the “oh” into auteur, as in “Oh, shit.”

What follows is a master class in things that go bump in the night. The director and his 5-person sound department understand that hearing is sometimes much more terrifying than seeing, and they employ that strategy via a riveting, locked-down, 19-minute-long single shot of Johnson and Gilmore cowering in their tent. The scene is broken only by a brief moment when they turn off and on their video camera’s on-board light.