Mysteries & Monsters Returns!

Episode 10 of my series Mysteries & Monsters has released today on the Small Town Monsters YouTube Channel!

Official Synopsis: In 1981, a family was besieged by a Bigfoots, UFOs and shadow people. Forced to defend themselves, the terrifying encounters lasted for weeks, but then mysteriously stopped. Eli teams up with Mark and Andy Matzke to investigate the strangest story from the land of Ohio.

The strangest story indeed. This episode is filled to the brim with high strangeness, but the actual truth of what happened back in 1981 mattered less to me than how I was going to pull it all off from a filmmaker’s perspective. One of the goals I set for myself when I started Mysteries & Monsters back in 2023, was to be able to do full on recreations for every episode. I didn’t want to use A.I. or artistic recreations, I wanted full on live action, with actors and special effects, which is even more daunting when you consider how low the budgets are for this series.

But for the past nine episodes I’ve pulled it off, with simple Bigfoot costumes, Seth’s really nice Dogman suit and other tricks. The most ambitious shoot I’ve done was featured in Episode 5: The Man From Venus, where I hired two actors to go out to Palm Springs to recreate the famous scene where Adamski meets Orthon out in the desert. It was stressful, hot, but I managed to pull it off.

But this episode was something else, it had so much more involved. Shadow people, Bigfoot, glowing red eyes, mysterious lights, light beams and more! I remember standing in my buddy Tyler Hall’s parent’s yard (where we shot most of the recreations) thinking “how am I going to pull this off?”

Well, I managed to skirt around some of the more difficult stuff (the horse and the transforming tree faller), but was pleased to have gotten much of the more iconic stuff from the book taken care of, like the light above the corn field and the truck scene. Most of the more unbelievable aspects, like the light, we accomplished with simple 2D compositing and lighting effects done in DaVinci Resolve.

Tyler Hall stars in this, as well as his father, Greg Hall. I couldn’t have asked for a better duo of actors than those two. I presented them this idea I had and they just jumped up on the roof, no questions asked. We shot it in the middle of the day and I just did an effect called “Day for Night”, where I made the day look like night. DaVinci’s sky replacement feature helped tremendously in this aspect, because no matter how dark I made the two actors look, the sky was still too blue.

Doing the muzzle flashes on the very real guns used in the making of the recreations was really nice for me. Not only were they easy to do (not that they even look very realistic) but it reminded me a lot of the visual effects I used to do in high school.

In high school I made over 30 short films with my friends. My brother and I spray painted nerf guns to make them look “real” and in After Effects I would add muzzle flashes and blood effects to complete the shoot em films. It was a lot of fun, and I learned so much about compositing and special effects work by doing that. The best film school truly is making your own films. So when I went to film school and I felt my editing experience wasn’t necessary, turns out it came in handy when putting together ten episodes of Mysteries & Monsters.

While my self made VFX may not be the best, I think it only adds to the charm of the series. I really wanted to capture the corniness of the recreations in old shows like In Search Of, and I think I’m doing that well enough. People don’t remember that series for how great the recreations were, people remember that show for visualizing what people’s experiences might have looked like. Which is what I’m trying to do.

More than that though, facing these challenges and working with talented actors and filmmakers like Tyler to make these kinds of projects is inspiring. It is true filmmaking in every sense. We have a limited budget, a limited amount of time and yet somehow it comes together and looks decent and most importantly, we’re having fun.

I hope everyone who watched this episode enjoys it. The story the has a lot of heart to it. Both Mark and Andy, in my opinion, tie this story together with their passion for this odd little story. And while there are several leads to pick up on to discover more of this case, I’m not sure if it will be expanded upon, leaving this as one strange unsolved mystery for the foreseeable future.