How Bigfoot stomped its way into pop culture (2024)

24June 2024

The footage is grainy and it runs for just under a minute. And yet, in the world of cryptozoological ethnography, it’s one of the most significant videos ever taken. Captured in 1967, the Patterson-Gimlin clip is considered the first hard evidence of Bigfoot, the famous cryptid located in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. In the opening scene of David and Nathan Zeller’s new film Sasquatch Sunset, a family of sasquatch can be spotted hiking across the American wilderness, turning sideways to face the camera just as in the original video.

It reminds me of a widely shared and horribly zoomed-in video that came out last year – an alleged Bigfoot sighting in Colorado taken by a couple on a tourist train depicting a brown, bipedal creature walking and squatting in its habitat. Not to be confused with Nicki Minaj’s 2024 diss track “Bigfoot”, where she spits “Bad bitch, she like six foot (ooh), I call her Big Foot (brr)”, accompanied by single artwork of the rapper’s pink heeled boot atop a ginormous footprint. The song might not actually be about the elusive creature – it’s actually a cruel takedown of Megan Thee Stallion – but jabs aside, Bigfoot is stomping its way across pop culture, so get ready for sasquatch summer.

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I’m no Bigfoot truther, but the evidence speaks for itself. Whether you’re a believer or not, Bigfoot is having a moment in the mainstream, which in any case, makes it real in our imaginary. A modern-day folklore celebrity, there’s something about the elusive creature that tickles the zeitgeist – and it’s not just A24 biting the bullet with a feature-length film, there’s an entire multiverse of cryptozoology threads on Reddit and TikTok reels fuelling the speculation, too.

At the Sundance premiere for Sasquatch Summer, the directors described the film as “representative of human’s connection to the natural world”, which, I think, is key to understanding Bigfoot’s appeal within pop culture. With the climate crisis an ever-present threat, we’re more aware than ever of humanity’s impact on the environment. In the Zeller brother’s film, for example, there’s a moment in which the sasquatch family encounter a tent in the forest, the human invasion of their natural habitat fuelling a moment of rage (basically grunting, yelling, jumping up and down), which highlights the tension between the man-made and natural. Forcing the viewer to see humanity from an outside POV is unsettling – we’re left to face the anthropocene and its mess head-on.

Yet Bigfoot isn’t so dissimilar to us. A hairy humanoid with suspicious similarities to the yeti and yowie, it has an upright posture, upper limbs and a bipedal motion. “Bigfoot represents a human-centric quest, a transhistorical fascination with ‘discovering’ alternative versions of ourselves,” says Oscar Salguero, founder of the Interspecies Library in New York. “In a world already full of incredible forms of intelligence, we are still stuck in the mirror.” It does however lack any feelings of shame that society has conditioned into us – in the film, sasquatch f*ck and urinate themselves in the most unbridled way. Maybe our cultural obsession with Bigfoot can be pinned down to imagining what life would be if nature remained untouched, a distant past before industrialisation forced us into cities, leaving us to navigate things like burnout and rising rent prices. To imagine the existence of a sasquatch is to imagine a ritualistic word untouched by humanity – similar to 2022’s Return to Monkee meme, only two years on, it’s more mystical, more hidden.

There’s something about the sasquatch, as a creature that hasn’t been proven to exist by human standards, and our current age of hyper-surveillance. Even for nonbelievers, there’s a mythic allure to the mysterious creature that taps into our very human desire to uncover hidden truths – think the internet’s obsession with aliens and conspiracy theories. The Reddit sleuth might think themselves a master of the unknown, circulating lo-res and pixelated images, while swapping theories between other users, but it’s more than just hoaxes and misinformation. Whether it’s Bigfoot, Mothman or the Jersey Devil, it’s not a coincidence that interest in cryptids is spiking at a time when cryptic algorithms track our digital footprint and data-ify our online behaviour. Just as deep-fried memes offer a way out of surveillance through pixel death oblivion, a similar sentiment can be felt in the grainy sightings of Bigfoot, as an animal thoroughly mythologised, yet who manages to avoid capture despite all the technology available to us.