American folklore has always been haunted by what it cannot prove.

Unlike the fixed monsters of European tradition, America’s creatures live in the margins — glimpsed, alleged, misremembered, always just beyond the frame. Bigfoot, perhaps more than any other, is not a monster of narrative but of testimony: a creature sustained less by sightings than by the human need to believe that the wilderness still hides something unconquered.

Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot arrives squarely within that tradition — and reveals both the power and the limits of trying to film a myth that survives precisely because it refuses to be filmed.

The Documentary as Incantation

Disguised as a scientific expedition, the film adopts the trappings of documentary authority: talking heads, field notes, expedition footage, and a tone of sober investigation. Long before the codification of found footage or mockumentary horror, Sasquatch positions itself as evidence rather than entertainment.

This strategy is not accidental. Bigfoot cinema has always depended on simulation. The myth thrives on blurry images, partial tracks, unreliable narrators. To present Sasquatch clearly would be to kill it.

In theory, the pseudo-documentary form is the perfect vessel for American cryptid folklore.

In practice, the film mistakes method for meaning.

The Failure of Authority

What quickly becomes apparent is that the film has little interest in tension, character, or even narrative momentum. The expedition exists less as drama than as scaffolding for assertion. We are told what to believe far more often than we are shown why.

The scientists, meant to embody rational inquiry, function largely as mouthpieces for exposition. The wilderness becomes backdrop rather than threat. Even the encounters with the creature are staged with such caution that they generate neither terror nor awe.

The pseudo-documentary approach, instead of lending credibility, drains the film of mystery.

By explaining too much and revealing too little, the film occupies the worst of both worlds: neither persuasive as evidence nor effective as horror.

Bigfoot and the American Imagination

And yet, to dismiss the film entirely would be to ignore its curious cultural value.

Bigfoot is not merely a monster. He is an American anxiety.

He emerges from frontier guilt, from the erasure of indigenous histories, from the fear that something ancient survived westward expansion. He is the embodiment of unfinished conquest — a reminder that the wilderness was never fully tamed, only renamed.

Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot gestures toward this lineage without ever articulating it. The film treats the creature as biological puzzle rather than cultural symptom. It wants to solve the legend, not understand it.

This is where the film’s ambition collapses.

By treating folklore as a problem to be disproved or confirmed, rather than a story to be interrogated, the film reduces myth to novelty.

When Myth Becomes Tourism

Much of the film feels less like investigation than like travelogue.

The expedition wanders, interviews drift, landscapes are photographed lovingly but without menace. The wilderness never becomes hostile, only scenic. The legend becomes an excuse for footage rather than a force shaping the narrative.

Even the final revelations — such as they are — lack conviction. The creature remains vague, the danger abstract, the consequences minimal.

What should feel like trespass instead feels like tourism.

The Prognosis:

Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot survives as a historical curiosity rather than a successful work of horror.

It is significant less for what it achieves than for what it anticipates: the long lineage of found footage, mockumentary, and cryptid cinema that would later understand how to weaponise uncertainty rather than explain it away.

In trying to capture a legend, the film forgets the one rule folklore demands:

A myth only survives if you never look at it too closely.

• Saul Muerte

So silent. So deadly. So final.

The mid-1970s horror market was awash with low-budget genre experiments, and Kiss of the Tarantula, directed by Chris Munger, fits neatly into that mould: a small-town thriller with a pulpy premise and an uneven execution. It’s a film that teeters on mediocrity for most of its runtime, but one that manages, almost unexpectedly, to crawl toward something far more compelling in its closing act.

The story follows Susan Bradley (Suzanna Ling), a troubled teenager whose closest companions are her pet tarantulas. Bullied, misunderstood, and scarred by childhood trauma, Susan turns her eight-legged friends into weapons, unleashing them on those who cross her. It’s a deliciously pulpy set-up—revenge served on a platter of fangs and venom—but the execution is too often sluggish, bogged down by pedestrian pacing and flat staging that sap the film of its potential bite.

For much of its runtime, Kiss of the Tarantula plays like a TV movie stretched too thin: the dialogue feels stilted, the performances serviceable but uninspired, and the horror largely tame. The spiders themselves are often more a novelty than a source of genuine terror, filmed with a kind of clumsy reverence that undercuts their menace. The film seems unsure whether it wants to be a serious psychological character study or a campy exploitation piece, leaving it stranded in the middle ground.

And yet, in its final act, something shifts. The atmosphere thickens, the tension sharpens, and the climax pays off with a burst of lurid energy that the preceding hour sorely lacked. Susan’s descent reaches a grim inevitability, and the film finally embraces its morbid premise with conviction. It doesn’t completely redeem the shortcomings, but it does leave the viewer with a stronger final impression than the slow middle stretch would suggest.

The Prognosis:

As a whole, Kiss of the Tarantula is far from a lost classic. It’s a curiosity, an example of 1970s regional horror that never quite capitalises on its deliciously twisted concept. Still, thanks to its striking finale, it avoids being dismissed outright. Mediocre for most of its length, lifted only at the end.

• Saul Muerte

By the flickering gaslight of memory, we descend into the catacombs…

In the vast mausoleum of cinema’s past, there lies a spectral figure whose face has haunted generations — not because it was seen, but because it was revealed. Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, was no mere actor; he was an alchemist of the grotesque, conjuring anguish and terror from wax and wire, shadow and silence. And in 1925, beneath the vaulted ceilings of the Paris Opera House — conjured on Universal’s backlot like a fever dream of Gothic excess — he achieved his magnum opus: The Phantom of the Opera.

Chaney’s transformation into Erik, the Opera Ghost, was no simple matter of greasepaint and prosthetics. Nay — this was a self-inflicted metamorphosis, a cruel devotional rite. He stretched his nostrils with fishhooks, pulled back his lips with piano wire, stuffed cotton into his cheeks and contorted his nose with collodion and spirit gum until he became the very spectre that Leroux’s fevered imagination had birthed. Witnesses on set reportedly recoiled in real terror. It was not performance — it was possession.

The result? A revelation. The reveal of Chaney’s ghastly visage in the catacombs remains one of the most seismic shocks in silent cinema — a jolt not merely of fright, but of empathy twisted by horror. His Phantom was not the debonair recluse we would come to see in later years, but a tragic wretch — equal parts Mephistopheles and martyr.

This duality, this tightrope walk between monstrous and misunderstood, laid the foundation upon which every subsequent Phantom would totter. Claude Rains, in the Technicolor sprawl of 1943, became the tragic artist disfigured by acid — his descent not from birth but from betrayal. Herbert Lom, in the blood-tinted grandeur of Hammer’s 1962 adaptation, leaned into melancholic villainy, a Phantom forged by society’s indifference. Robert Englund — ever the sadistic showman — sliced his way through the 1980s in a slasher-inflected fever dream. And of course, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical wraith — perhaps the most culturally ubiquitous — swapped horror for high romance, crooning beneath the chandelier with yearning rather than rage.

Yet all of them, every last Phantom, owed a debt to Chaney.

His influence was not confined to narrative or design — it permeated cinema’s very DNA. The idea that the monster is also the victim, that the face behind the mask might inspire pity rather than revulsion — this was Chaney’s gospel. His Phantom is cinema’s first antihero in full — a sympathetic spectre long before capes and cowls became a genre of their own.

And let us not forget his legacy behind the lens. Chaney’s refusal to allow studio make-up artists near his face gave birth to the actor-as-architect — the performer who carves the mask himself. In his wake came Karloff, Lugosi, even Brando in his monstrous mumble. Every character actor who lost themselves in latex and madness owes a nod to the man who first made the grotesque beautiful.

He died in 1930, silenced by throat cancer before the talkies could claim his growl. But he remains eternal — not just in celluloid, but in spirit. Every time a horror film dares to ask us to empathise with the beast, every time a mask slips to reveal a wound, it is Chaney we are glimpsing beneath the flesh.

So raise your glass, dear reader, to the man who made the shadows sing. For behind every mask, there is pain. And behind that — if we dare look closely enough — there is Lon Chaney.

• Saul Muerte

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A Cathedral of Sound and Silence: The Importance of Music in a Silent Masterpiece

It’s been 40 years since The Return of the Living Dead shuffled, sprinted, and shrieked its way onto cinema screens, unleashing a chaotic blend of punk rock anarchy, grotesque splatter, and dark comedy that set it apart from the more solemn zombie canon of the time. Written and directed by Alien co-creator Dan O’Bannon in his directorial debut, the film took a side door into George A. Romero’s undead universe and blew it wide open with a mohawked middle finger.

Rather than emulate Romero’s social commentary-laden horrors, O’Bannon opted for something rowdier, more rebellious. He injected his tale with a subversive punk ethos that thrived on nihilism, attitude, and aesthetic chaos — fitting perfectly with the Reagan-era disillusionment bubbling beneath the surface of 1980s youth culture. From the moment the Tarman lurches from his canister with a gooey “Braaaains,” you know you’re in for something altogether weirder, louder, and dirtier.

A Director of Dark Ideas

O’Bannon’s fingerprints are all over this madness. Having previously collaborated with John Carpenter on Dark Star (1974), a lo-fi sci-fi satire, O’Bannon showed early signs of his interest in bureaucratic ineptitude, flawed authority figures, and characters who crack under pressure. Those themes are alive and well in Return, as Frank and Freddy (James Karen and Thom Mathews) bungle their way into doomsday with pitch-black comic flair. O’Bannon’s ability to juggle absurdity and dread feels like a spiritual continuation of Dark Star’s cosmic incompetence — only now with punk rock zombies and rib cages flying across the screen.

Linnea Quigley: Scream Queen Icon

No retrospective is complete without acknowledging Return’s punk siren, Linnea Quigley. As Trash — the cemetery-dancing, death-fantasizing goth girl — Quigley became a bona fide B-movie legend. Her performance isn’t just a campy cult favourite; it’s emblematic of a genre era where sex, gore, and attitude collided. I had the pleasure of interviewing Quigley in the early days of the Surgeons of Horror podcast, and her passion for indie horror and her status as a scream queen remain as potent today as ever.

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/saul-muerte8/embed/episodes/Queen-of-the-Bs—Linnea-Quigley-interview-erotlb/a-a4rf2dc

The Sound of the Underground

One of the film’s most enduring legacies is its soundtrack. It didn’t just accompany the movie — it was the movie’s beating heart. Featuring tracks from The Cramps, 45 Grave, T.S.O.L., The Damned, and Roky Erickson, the music seethes with defiance and doom. The soundtrack wasn’t an afterthought; it was a manifesto. It locked the film into the punk subculture and turned it into a midnight movie mainstay, the kind you quoted at parties and watched on scratched VHS at 2AM with your loudest friends.

A Cult That’s Still Kicking

The Return of the Living Dead didn’t just inspire sequels — it inspired a lifestyle. Its heady mix of gallows humour, splatterpunk visuals, and self-awareness gave rise to a devoted fanbase who still scream “Send more paramedics!” at screenings. Its zombies are fast, smart, and unrelenting, subverting Romero’s rules and adding fresh panic to the genre. And its influence bleeds through countless horror-comedies that followed, from Dead Alive to Shaun of the Dead.

Though not always polished — the film wears its rough edges like badges of honour — Return survives as a riotous time capsule of punk horror energy. Dan O’Bannon may have only directed a handful of films, but this one alone is enough to keep his name in the horror hall of fame.

The Prognosis:

Forty years on, The Return of the Living Dead still kicks, bites, and thrashes. Whether you’re here for the brains, the tunes, or the screaming, mohawked zombies, there’s no denying its impact on horror, punk culture, and midnight movie fandom.

• Saul Muerte