Window Into the Past: The Taylor’s Vale Monster

Posted on January 22, 2014 by fsdthreshold

A treasure has been unearthed! Our friend Hagiograph has delved into his storage boxes and discovered some reels of movie film that constitute a part of our cinematographic efforts from our childhood. I’ll put the link in here, and below it, I’ll add some notes. Here’s the link to the video on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/8gY4wPqNpkI

This piece, a silent 8mm movie film, is called The Taylor’s Vale Monster (circa 1976). Our earliest filmmaking, of which this movie is a prime example, was unquestionably inspired by Jaws, with a significant difference: we were boys growing up in Illinois, far from any ocean, and our storytelling adapted the Jaws-like plot to the setting of woods, fields, open spaces, an enormous sky, and frozen blankets of snow. Our imaginations were also steeped in tales of cryptozoology — encounters with mysterious creatures in lonely places — a literature to which we were introduced primarily by my dad (who, both fittingly and ironically, appears in this movie as the scoffer, who discounts the photo my own character has taken of the monster).

Yes, that’s me, the first person you see, that long-haired boy driving the golf cart. And the first dog you see is my dog Hooper.

Three of us had movie cameras — Hagiograph, my Cousin Phil, and I — and our typical practice was to each make a variation on pretty much the same story; whoever’s camera was being used was the director, and we all participated in everyone’s movie. We wouldn’t have wanted it any differently. There was a cluster of monster films, a group of WWII air combat stories, and a series of Star Wars spawns. By then, we were starting to work on our own projects, doing rudimentary documentaries, adaptations of short stories, etc. But what we have in this clip is from the beginnings.

(Mr. Brown Snowflake from this blog also helped out regularly, though he somehow missed getting into The Taylor’s Vale Monster.) So the film you see here is a very close cousin in plot to my version, In Search of Bigfoot. Hagiograph has taken the first step in preserving such films for the digital age, and we owe him a great debt for that. Hagiograph, thank you!

He has also created the musical soundtrack for his film, and it is amazing.

When you watch this, yes, you will see the grainy, silly product of some preteen boys who love monsters. But really, that’s the value of this film. It’s not about the story we were trying to tell; it’s about what we see now, what we experience, when we look back at those boys in the seventies. This film will show you something about who we were, and why we are the way we are.

Let the shaky images carry you to another time, to open fields surrounded by creeks and woods. Let the music transport you to an eerie world. And pay special attention to the last few frames. You might get an extra chill. There’s something to these old films we made — something a little unsettling; something well worth preserving.

 

26 Responses to Window Into the Past: The Taylor’s Vale Monster

  1. Hagiograph says:

    Fred, you have definitely infused this film with a bit more depth than I often think about it, but it is very true about a window into the past.

    That’s what I loved about digging this up. It was weird but watching it I could even smell the smells of the time as well as feel the experience of being back there. That was the most fun aspect for me.

    I also love the seriousness with which we often approached the filmmaking process (barring your silly grin as you hold the polaroid out to show the “skeptic”, ie your dad…and indeed that was a TRUE irony! Your dad was the one who had all the books and magazines about fortean stuff so it only fits that he would be the skeptic here! Did we plan that???)

    As for the soundtrack….well, you do it far more justice than it deserves. I started off to do something “bigger” but got real lazy real fast and only vaguely pegged the music to the action hoping more for serendipity. The only “structure” put on the soundtrack was to change from Cminor to Dminor when we went from summer to winter!

    Thank the heavens for synthesizers with arpeggiators as well!

    Now…the REAL GOAL HERE was to inspire YOU TO DIG OUT THE TREASURES in Taylorville. Open your vault, Mr. Carter! Digitize!

    As I said earlier on the blog a few years back: many of us I’m sure would pitch in to pay for the process. I would gladly fund a significant portion of this project. And I’m betting I’m not alone.

    Reply
  2. Hagiograph says:

    One other thing I noted was how gawdawfully WHITE my parents’ home was. It is barely noticeable in the film but the differences between the life I was raised in (strictly ordered, white, bright, organized) contrasts with Fred’s house (gloriously disorganized, darker corners to explore).

    This was a metaphor for my childhood. I couldn’t wait to escape the dreadful overwhelming snowblindness of my folks’ house to get over to the Durbins and the chance to mentally and physically explore a space and ways of being.

    In some ways this trip down memory lane is sad. It is a reminder that save for one island of glorious insanity in my neighborhood I would have been even more messed up than I am right now.

    Reply
  3. fsdthreshold says:

    I really appreciate your kind words about my house and family, Hagio — thank you! But if you hadn’t been around, things at my place wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting, either. We sparked each other’s imaginations in just the right way, and we sure had fun.

    Aside from our real-life situations, I do feel a weird, austere sadness in this film. We used the landscapes in such a way that emphasizes isolation. The music adds to that feeling. And the characters all seem very much alone. Human interaction means being scoffed at. A sympathetic “bigfoot expert” arrives, but he and the protagonist immediately split up. Each character sets out alone into the monster’s realm, and each one dies alone. In the case of the last one (who runs back to get his helmet before setting out into the unknown), we don’t even see how he dies. We simply know by now that the monster kills everyone.

    I can’t speak for Phil’s panther film, but as far as I know, Taylor’s Val(u)e Monster has the distinction of being the only one of our films with winter scenes. And there’s a lot of genuinely creepy stuff going on . . . that use of the woodpile — somehow you knew, even at that age, that a face peeking out from concealment, a furry hand sticking out from behind a barrier, is far more frightening than a monster in the open — because no matter how scary you make the monster, the viewer’s imagination will always, always make it scarier if left to work. (That’s Stephen King’s “10-foot bug” principle, set forth in Danse Macabre — after the terrible, tense buildup, you show the reader A TEN-FOOT BUG! And the reader thinks, “Yeah, that’s scary. But I’d been picturing a thirty-foot bug.” Show the reader a FIFTY-FOOT BUG!!! — and, sure enough, the reader had been imagining a one-hundred-foot bug . . . Anyway, you GOT that, even as a preteen film director.)

    But back to sadness . . . it’s striking how the camera did that light-overload effect in the snowy landscape toward the end. The last character is alone in empty whiteness — even the wintry field is gone around him. Like I said, if we could use the same tools NOW, we could make a movie that would creep us and everyone else out so intensely that none of us would sleep again for a long, long time!

    Reply
  4. Jedibabe says:

    Fred, this is a fun look back at a simpler time. It’s a great window to who you all were, but since I didn’t know any of you then, it reminds me of my own childhood adventures; many Star Wars tales spun from horseback, in makeshift costumes. Back then, guns were just fun toys of the imagination, now they are so much more. It is enjoyable to travel back to that naive era when our imaginations had so much more room, because they weren’t yet stuffed full of video games and virtual reality. Thanks for sharing and I have to agree that if you have other old films you’d be wise to digitize them and maintain them for posterity sake. Think how much you’ll enjoy them in another 40 years, not to mention your kids enjoyment from the opportunity to know their dads and to re-visit history in such a personal way.

    Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      Thanks, Jedibabe! You’ve illustrated the truth further: just as we adapted Jaws to the prairie, you adapted Star Wars to horseback! We work with what we’ve got!

      Reply
  5. Mr. Brown Snowflake says:

    Not sure why I was not in this one … and I don’t remember the golf cart! However, I loved seeing my buddy Hooper.
    The Durbin household did indeed hold many nooks and crannies … all sorts of adventure awaited! I always loved going there!
    I never knew that any of the films included winter scenes … most of the time I recall us filming in the summer (in the kind of stifling heat and humidity Fred has always loved!).
    The few times I went over to Hagio’s I remember being very careful not to make a mess or be dirty … everything was in perfect order. Of course, that rarely happened, as Hagio was always over at Fred’s anyway!
    Great to hear from Jedibabe/Tauriel, too! Happy to see you back on the blog!
    Now, when will Shieldmaiden and Daylily chime in?

    Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      Sometimes I think about just how much that old brown house influenced me in the stories I’ve written since then. The settings of both my published books so far are, in one way or another, parts of that house and the barn.

      I would guess that the only reason you weren’t in this film, Brown, was a problem of distance between houses. I know you town kids had all sorts of adventures that I wasn’t part of . . . and you didn’t get in on some of the stuff we did in the country. We didn’t have cars at that age! (So the “adults” we were portraying in our movies drove vehicles such as golf carts and snowmobiles . . .) Hagio, I’d forgotten that your family had a snowmobile — I remember now! So Randy’s wasn’t the only one in the neighborhood.

      Reply
      • Morwenna says:

        The golf cart and the snowmobile almost seem to become characters in the story, tying things in with doomed ships and so on.

        Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      I think we figured it out, and you’ve recovered it below. It’s useful information for everyone: When you log in and type in your user name, it must exactly match the way you typed it when you first registered on the site. Otherwise, the system will think you’re a different person and assign you a different avatar.

      Reply
  7. Hagiograph says:

    Fred, your point about the “sadness” of the film, indeed that was almost EXACTLY my feeling and originally I kind of wanted to just put some noodling music that was in a minor key completely unrelated to the movie for that very reason.

    As for the overexposure thing near the end that was part film and part post-processing. When I got the DVD’s they were a bit dark (underexposed or aged, hard to tell after 37 or so years) so I bumped up the “brightness” up. So when I saw what it did in the last scenes I was wanting to change it back but then thought: nah it looks better this way.

    A couple years back I got a couple of random “scrap reels” digitized (I’ll try to dig that up and put it up as well, but it was mostly stuff I filmed in Mt. Auburn, so it isn’t as interesting overall).

    I love to do the “mind time travelling” thing, but seeing some film footage decades after you last viewed it makes it all the more shockingly real. And it is so much more visceral than fuzzy poorly remembered thoughts.

    Just seeing Tinker hobble down the drive with me in this film was a great experience. I wish I could explain to my dogs now “This was my buddy for so much time! Tinker the Three Legged Dog! Fleshy, why can’t YOU be as well behaved and mellow as Tinker?”

    It really does make me hunger for more of these old film reels.

    Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      YES! It is so visceral — seeing this footage brings those memories back so sharply! Tinker was an extremely good-natured dog. There are so many people and things I wish we’d taken footage of: the trap swing . . . the barn’s interior, ground floor and hayloft . . . a lot more of our parents . . . but actually, if we can recover all mine from storage, there’s a lot more. Sinbad was filmed indoors. And remember Interval, Interval, the title of which you received in a dream? We’ve gotta rescue those! There was Invasion on Nucleos and Return to Nucleos. There was Air Combat Over Rabaul, in which the two interior sets for the cockpit of a Corsair were: 1. the brick entranceway to the storm cellar (what were we thinking?!), and 2. Dad’s old Dodge sedan. Yep, let’s turn on the AM radio in that Corsair and see if we can tune in to the altimeter station . . .

      Reply
      • Hagiograph says:

        Fred, I dug up the earlier DVD I had made of some of my random 50′ rolls and there’s actually some of the ‘trap swing’ on there.

        I’m in the process of cutting this one up so it kind of parses out the unrelated stuff (filming in Mt. Auburn and Springfield).

        There’s actually more T-ville stuff than I had remembered on that DVD.

        I’ll try to get it in presentable form and upload to Youtube.

        Reply
  8. i am mr brown snowflake says:

    One thing that strikes me now as curious is why we were so convinced the “monster” would be a carnivore, or at least a killer.
    In the “Bigfoot Researcher” film of Niigata University fame, there was SOME effort to document the creature, but it swiftly became a kill-the-thing-cause-it-killed-Hagio plot. Thoughts?

    Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      Excellent observation, Mr. Brown! On the one hand, we all knew that in real life, a bigfoot is a shy, gentle creature, with almost no reports of any threatening actions toward humans (in all the literature, I can think of two accounts: Ape Canyon and that story attributed to Teddy Roosevelt). But in our films, we always made the bigfoot a homicidal rogue. I suppose that’s the Jaws influence, and the need for action and conflict in the movies.

      Reply
      • Hagiograph says:

        Clearly story telling is best when there’s a more active antagonist. So of course BF will be a homicidal monster intent on rivers of blood. AND it’s not like we didn’t have the fur coat and gorilla masks…so do the math!

        Reply
        • i am mr brown snowflake says:

          Imagine if Fred had somehow acquired scuba gear? Can you just see a dorsal fin snaking across the pond? I think the only things that stopped a Nessie-type film being made was how to film a “believable” monster in the water and not having the costumes, otherwise you just know we would have tried it! If RH could be believed to be piloting a F4U-4 Corsair from the entrance to the storm cellar (gad!) than anything would have been fair game … like killing a sasquatch with a 50-cent smoke bomb! LOL

          Reply
          • Hagiograph says:

            Fred had a cool system for a small-scale water-monster. He had plastic dimetrodon with a hollow body and no underside. He put a hollow tube from a plastic jumprope into it, submurged the dimetrodon in the tank off to the left of the main barndoor and blew air into it. It caused the dimetrodon to rise and bubbles to come out as it came up as I recall. It took precise placement of the plastic tube.

          • fsdthreshold says:

            I did rig up an underwater breathing apparatus for use at the pond one time. I was old enough to go to stores and buy things, so I must have been a mid-teenager — possibly even driving age. I bought about 15 feet of very sturdy, transparent hose about 2 inches in diameter. Somehow I fastened one end of the hose to the stern of our john-boat, with an open end pointing upward. I would submerge myself in the pond and try to breathe through the hose. I got a few breaths, but it was unsuccessful overall. For one thing, I think it would be hard to breathe through a long hose on land. For another, when you’re six or eight feet underwater, you can feel the weight of it all pressing on you — it’s a lot harder to take a breath. Finally, the pond’s water was muddy and opaque. There was nothing to see but blackness, and below the sun-warmed upper few feet, the abyss was icy cold. Not a good underwater experience.

  9. Morwenna says:

    Open a time capsule, and out jumps bigfoot!

    Wonderful soundtrack, Hagio. And loyal Tinker turns in a very touching performance as himself. (Casting call: “No four-legged dogs need apply.”)

    Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      Hi, Morwenna! Great casting call! 🙂 Actually, I think Tinker was a girl, wasn’t she, Chris? It was short for “Tinkerbell” (named by Chris’s mom, as I recall).

      We also see Chris’s dog Giles in one of these clips. Giles was the dog that my dad simply decided to call “Gilbert,” and he always did. Giles was Gilbert to my dad.

      Reply
        • i am mr brown snowflake says:

          Yes, Morwenna … although some of the cats may have been of the female persuasion. We geeks did not exactly draw a lot of attention from the fairer sex …

          Reply
    • Morwenna says:

      Snowflake, I think Fred is hunting down a crazed bigfoot that’s rampaging on a golf course. Fred was hired for this mission because he can drive a golf cart like it’s the Mach Five!

      Reply

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