The way Mount St. Helens looms large over James Chick’s home turned out to be inspirational for the aspiring local filmmaker.
Chick and his new wife moved from the Portland-metro area to the unincorporated community of Ariel, near Lake Merwin, in 2020. That’s where his imagination was captivated by the mountain, he said, and by legends about the monstrous quasi-human creature that supposedly prowls the region.
“Before I even started writing, I thought, what fun story would I want to watch?” he said. “Well, I have 5 acres out there near Mount St. Helens. It made sense to go with a Bigfoot story.”
Chick, 38, started writing a Bigfoot script in 2022, he said. Two years later, at 7 p.m. Thursday, his inaugural effort at producing, writing and directing a full-length feature film — a mystery-horror film called “Feet of Death” — will screen at Kiggins Theatre in downtown Vancouver. Chick will attend the screening and take audience questions during a Q&A session afterward, he said.
Bigfoot will also be in attendance, Chick added, so filmgoers can snap selfies with the monster.
After all that, in late September, the 104-minute “Feet of Death” will be available on various streaming platforms, including Amazon, Chick said. That means the Kiggins event is your only chance to see the film on the silver screen.
While he made the film on a shoestring budget of about $15,000 ($10,000 of which was crowdfunded), Chick said he still aimed high as a writer and director. He said he has worked on many film and TV productions, from commercials to the (now closed) Hive-FX special effects lab that worked on the popular TV show “Grimm,” which was produced in Portland from 2011-2017.
“I’ve worked in low-budget,” he said with a chuckle. “My goal with ‘Feet of Death’ was to make sure it didn’t look like a low-budget film. We couldn’t afford Tom Cruise, but I wanted to make sure we had real talent.”
The small ensemble of actors Chick cast all come from Oregon and Washington, he said, but not from Clark County. He rented top-notch equipment, including camera lenses, to give his film the sheen of a top-quality production. And he made the most of the local scenery, he said, shooting in many different locations — including a police station, a sawmill, a forest cabin and a genuinely unlit cave.
The crew filmed in an underground lava tube near Trout Lake called Cheese Cave, where pioneering landowners once stored potatoes and cheese. There, Chick and his crew managed to overcome an equipment breakdown with a jury-rigged solution.
They drove for two hours to reach Cheese Cave, Chick said, only to discover when they arrived that their generator was broken. Without the generator, Chick said, it was genuinely dark down in the cave.
What saved the day of shooting, Chick said, was substituting his truck’s diesel engine for the dead generator.
“We left my truck running for eight hours straight,” he said. “We made it work.”
“Feet of Death” involved just 12 days of principal photography, Chick said.
What’s the story all about? It begins with a “paranormal social media influencer” investigating a series of mysterious deaths at the foot of the mountain, Chick said. Separately, U.S. Forest Service agents are investigating too. As the mystery grows — and grows bloodier — the county sheriff gets involved.
“It starts out a whodunit.” Chick said. “Did a person do this? Or is it Bigfoot? Does Bigfoot exist?”
Chick said he didn’t want to give away more than that — other than to add, the final third of the film is when “all hell breaks loose.”
“There are twists the audience won’t see coming,” he said.
Whether you call it Bigfoot or Sasquatch, the legendary local creature has been enjoying a yearslong media moment. An art-house oddity called “Sasquatch Sunset” debuted earlier this year, featuring an A-list cast in hairy costumes whose dialogue consists of nothing but grunting. In 2018, big-mustachioed Clark College alumnus Sam Elliot starred in the unlikely “The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot.” (Unsurprisingly, reviews of both films were mixed.)
The Wikipedia category for “Bigfoot films” lists 59.
Chick said he doesn’t claim to be a lifelong Bigfoot film fan or mystery hunter, but he knows many people in the area are, including fellow filmmakers.
“I know another guy making another Bigfoot film,” he said.
