Midst celebrating the warm, warm reception of S-VHS’ Sundance world premiere (Fango's review), and especially their segment in particular, Eduardo Sanchez and longtime producer/now co-director Gregg Hale (THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT) are still actively finishing up their next foray into found footage, EXISTS. “We are mixing the sound right now. Then, we’ll be doing color correction. Basically, by the end of January, first week of February, we’ll be done and then we have a whole sales strategy,” Sanchez tells Fango.

While Sundance has certainly been kind and the filmmaker received much acclaim along the festival circuit for last year’s eerie LOVELY MOLLY as well, the team aren’t so sure EXISTS is appropriate. “We don’t know if it’s really a festival film, really,” Hale says. “I love film festivals, and if it ended up as part of promoting the film that we ended up in a festival, that’d be great, but I kind of feel like let’s deal with a distributor first. It feels like that kind of movie to me. It’s definitely our most commercial, accessible movie, for sure.”

With found footage, or POV, or mockumentary, or cinema scarité now an institution, it’s undeniable Sanchez and Hale are the ones that institutionalized it with their seminal BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. LOVELY MOLLY employed the aesthetic in doses, but they’re returning in full with EXISTS, citing Bigfoot tradition as the reason. “We were actually going to shoot the film conventionally, with a little bit of POV, but normal coverage,” the director explains. “A month/month-and-a-half before we shot, we thought, ‘this feels like it could be a found footage movie.’ For us, as the BLAIR WITCH guys, we haven’t avoided found footage, but it’s all about how you see it in your head as you’re reading it. So, we thought Bigfoot and found footage are a perfect mix. The thing about Bigfoot is that every time you’ve seen him or supposedly seen him, or even heard him, it is found footage. It’s somebody videotaping camping or the Patterson-Gimlin film on Super 8 in the woods. We felt like that was the proper way. There are a lot of scenes in the movie that feel like that typical Bigfoot, 'What was that?' Then obviously, by the end, it’s Bigfoot.”

With found footage often used as a grounded, humanizing window into more paranormal horror, Bigfoot straddles a line as well. Unreal, yet a creature of the earth, it is this connection and roots which fascinate Sanchez and allow him to still find fear and even tribute in the legend. “To me, it’s the fact that it feels real. We lit it, but there’s never a scene where you’re like that’s a fucking huge light hitting those woods,” Sanchez says. “Everything is very realistic and the creature looks and sounds like it’s really there. It doesn’t do any supernatural—it can’t lift a car, but it is powerful . It’s just the idea of these young people going in kind of cluelessly.”

“Also, we’re trying to be as respectful as possible to the Bigfoot community because they have this belief of this thing that’s out there. I share these sentiments, I want to believe. I love everything about it, so we try to get into it as scientifically as possible. And the whole thing with the Bigfoot people is we didn’t want to make it this killing machine doing Godzilla-like things. We wanted it to be a real character and we thought about that. By the end of the movie you realize there’s more to why it’s doing this. It has human characteristics. I came to the sound mix last week and it really is this cool amount of ape and man and something unknown. To me, it’s this unknown thing coming after you and it’s of this earth. It’s not from outer space. It’s an animal that is chasing you.”

For more on EXISTS, keep an eye on FANGORIA as the film nears completion. You can find the film’s official Facebook right here. 

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