In a time of fear over an invisible enemy and political turmoil, we may easily forget this month is October, a month known for stories about more mythical creatures and creations, leading up to All Hallow’s Eve. These stories can be powerful though, sometimes becoming more real than the fear exhibited in current news reports. As narrator Lyle Blackburn explains in Small Town Monsters’ (STM) newest documentary, The Mothman Legacy, “The story is a powerful thing… A story can manifest sadness or depression, laughter or tears; and yes, a story can instill fear. The question we might begin to ask ourselves is not who put the fear there or why, but what if the stories that instilled it to begin with are true? Not simply fables, but something more. Something primal and ageless. A something whose very survival depends on our telling of tales.”
The Mothman Legacy, a direct sequel to 2017’s Mothman of Point Pleasant, continues the story of West Virginia’s famous cryptid, the mothman. Said to have giant wings and glowing red eyes, the creature has been spotted all around the Point Pleasant area, a quiet town along the Ohio River, bordering Gallipolis, Ohio. It is supposedly able to fly up to 100 miles per hour. Although it was first sighted in 1966, then referred to as a “birdman,” the creature became more widely known after John Keel’s book “The Mothman Prophecies” in 1975 (and the 2002 motion picture adaption starring Richard Gere), after which sightings began to be connected with death due to sightings prior to the Silver Bridge collapse in 1967.
As with his previous films, Seth Breedlove, writer and director of Mothman, remains a skeptic about the creature, providing eyewitness testimonies as well as facts about the town and the stories to spin a complete tale of mystery that allows its audience to form their own assumptions about whether the creature exists. Nonetheless, whether or not one believes eyewitnesses, filmed and animated recreations draw in audiences until they might question their own understanding of the stories.
Unlike their previous films, however, STM was faced with COVID-19 shutdowns, which pushed the release of the film back one month. From its initial production in December, interviewing eyewitnesses and filming recreations in an AirBNB, to a prolonged break from filming in March, Breedlove and his crew were forced to finish behind schedule in a studio in Point Pleasant, altering the look of some interviews from those already filmed. As compared to its immediate predecessors, On the Trail of UFOs 2 and MOMO: the Missouri Monster, Mothman contains fewer live-action recreations of stories as the result of precautions. Despite this, the crew was able to edit each clip appropriately so as not to divert viewers from the story.
Since their first release, Minerva Monster—about the mysterious bigfoot sightings in and around Minerva, Ohio—STM, which is comprised of Breedlove and his wife Adrienne, Jates Utes, Zac Palmisano, Brandon Dalo, and Mark Matzke, have released has released 10 films and 4 series. “Today we operate with a fairly small crew still (4-6) but the total number of people working on any given project has risen exponentially. Currently, I’d say there’s as many as 15-20 people involved in the production of an STM project, from animators to practical FX artists to graphics artists, colorists, sound design, etc.”
Free of the Hollywood system, STM is funded predominately via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. “Early on, Kickstarter was a nice addition to our yearly revenue and helped us manage to handle some production costs but we could have survived without it. These days, as our budgets have grown, so has our reliance on Kickstarter to sustain us through the year,” Breedlove explains. Still, the crew’s documentaries are produced at higher levels that what is commonly seen in in theaters and on DVD. As Breedlove says, “We make movies that compete with most of what you see on television and we do it at a fraction of the cost.”
In a time where fear is all around us, learning about local legends is the perfect way to understand why certain ideas scare us the most. For the Mothman, hiding in the shadows and the skies of southern Ohio and West Virginia, the question might not be why it scares us, but rather from where the fear originated.
The Mothman Legacy is available for purchase on Blu-ray and DVD online at www.smalltownmonsters.com as well on all major streaming purchase platforms.
