Preserving the Relationship Between Mythical Creatures and Humanity
The Creature Files – Episode Twelve: "Small Towns,
Big Monsters"
SHOW NOTES:
Sightings Desk: Bigfoot sightings in St. Lawrence County, New York
Creature Feature: Features about Creatures
Special Guest: Seth Breedlove
Today, we’re talking about documenting the creatures that make up the cryptid phenomenon. So I suppose you could say our creature feature is about features involving creatures. But first, let's digress a bit…
Before there were movies, before there were books…there was storytelling. The oral tradition of telling stories…It wasn’t just around the campfire. Storytelling was an ancient art form. And it was entertainment, education, and culture. Consider that before we had a printing press, the only way we could pass along experiences was through storytelling. And the stories were often local tales. They sprang out of communities of people all over the world who experienced their environment in different ways. Sometimes these stories explained the unexplainable, other times the stories were tales taken from real experiences. But they were easy to recall and to share…And they helped connect people to each other. These were collective dreams and nightmares…Common histories…Cultural values…Traditions, etc. And they helped people makes sense of the world they lived in. Mythology and folklore can tell us a lot about different cultures and people.
But myth and folklore didn’t just stop at some point in the past. It continues to this day. We are always creating new myths and new folktales to describe the world around us. The difference is, we have other ways to pass on our stories to the next generation. One such way is through filmmaking…and there is no one more prolifically documenting the local tales of cryptids and other phenomenon than Small Town Monsters and its founder Seth Breedlove.
With a camera, a crew, and an insatiable curiosity, Seth has set out to bring this modern day folklore to the masses…interviewing the original witnesses and re-creating/re-discovering elements of the cases at the local level. His work has covered the Minerva Monster, Beast of Whitehall, the Boggy Creek Monster, the Mothman, Flatwoods Monster, Bray Road beast, Momo, bigfoot, and more.
His most recent productions are under the banner “On the trail of…” and cover a myriad of creatures and UFO sightings. His latest film is The Mark of the Bell Witch, a documentary with extensive recreations that cover the local folktale involving an incident from the early nineteenth century in Adams, Tennessee.
You can learn more about Seth at www.smalltownmonsters.com and stream his films and series on Amazon prime, vimeo, itunes, Google play and other services.
