Christopher Noël: Confident There is a Body

1) Back in September, Rick told FB/FB the whole story, but swore them to secrecy. To their credit, they kept the information in the vault. Three months later, Robert Lindsay leaked the story of the killing, and only then did Rick speak of it publicly. This is not at all the profile of someone pushing a hoax. Rick had made an agreement with Minnow Films not to reveal what happened that night in San Antonio, and he was sticking to it, but once the information was out, he confirmed it.

2) Morgan Matthews and Minnow Films have now had five months to come forward and deny Rick’s version of events, which they have consistently failed to do, even now, in the wake of the documentary premiere. If Rick’s story were a hoax, Matthews and Minnow would be making themselves complicit with their recent and current behavior, a choice that would have a devastating impact upon their professional credibility and their standing in the film industry going forward. I do not side with those who believe that participating in some grand hoax, merely in order to shame and ridicule the Bigfoot research community, would be a profitable approach. As they well know, the truth will inevitably emerge (and probably quite soon), and if Matthews and Minnow were to turn out to have been complicit in such a hoax, their product would instantly become irrelevant and widely dismissed, because it would have failed to use this trick in any meaningful way within the film itself and would be rightly seen as just manipulating and belittling its audience in addition to mocking its documentary subjects.

3) At the end of Shooting Bigfoot, the director sits on a plane, headed back home to England, face still black and blue from his recent violent encounter in the woods. We hear his voice explaining that “a viewer could reasonably conclude that I was attacked by someone in a suit.” This is all that he is willing to say, leaving us to mull it over and anticipate the sequel. (If there were to be no sequel, why end the current release with such a coy and blatant dot dot dot?)

Between the end of filming in San Antonio and the Toronto premiere, Matthews had nearly eight months to carefully craft his project in the editing room; as an experienced filmmaker, he can be assumed to have made highly conscious choices, based on proven storytelling techniques.

Why choose the precise language he did–“a viewer could reasonably conclude…”–unless he plans to execute a worthy twist along the lines of: “But that viewer would be wrong!”? Even the most die-hard Dyer detractors cannot honestly propose that the sequel (or an expanded director’s cut) will pick up the dramatic thread like this: “And that viewer would be…CORRECT…ha ha! No surprise here at all, folks!”