Attack The Block Director Joe Cornish Wants To Make A Bigfoot Movie (And We Want To Watch It) [Exclusive]

Joe Cornish, the writer-director of "Attack the Block" and showrunner behind the upcoming Netflix series "Lockwood & Co.," has a hankering to make a Bigfoot movie. It turns out that Cornish, a self-described "Bigfoot obsessive," is itching to do right by a genre that may not even be fully formed in everyone's eyes. Think about it: can you name five great Bigfoot movies ... or even one? How about 47 of them, ranked?

It's a sad state of affairs when the most well-known Sasquatch onscreen may be Harry from "Harry and the Hendersons." Not that there's anything wrong with Harry, who went on to star in his own sitcom and whose makeup design won Rick Baker an Oscar in the interim. But here's a fun fact about Harry: he was played by Kevin Peter Hall the same year Hall played the original "Predator."

It feels like we're owed a movie where Bigfoot, too, is a predator, preying on humans, not unlike the alien invaders in "Attack the Block." That's one idea, anyway. Ahead of the release of "Lockwood & Co.," /Film's Jack Giroux recently spoke with Cornish, who mentioned that he has his own "idea for a Bigfoot movie percolating." The filmmaker said:

"Sometimes I think about genres that nobody's done well, and the thing about Bigfoot is there are a couple of really good movies, like 'The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot.' I love that movie. There's a lot of really good stuff in 'Legend of Boggy Creek,' and there are a lot of really good '70s ones, but nobody's done the really f****** great movie in the way that, do you know what I mean? It's a genre that feels like it's waiting for the prestige, sophisticated, super f****** great movie to come along."

The two films Cornish mentions, "The Legend of Boggy Creek" and "The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot," premiered in 1972 and 2018, respectively. They're equidistant from the turn of the millennium, and that's entirely too long between movies.

I just got done listening to the audiobook of "Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre" by Max Brooks, the author of "World War Z." The voice cast includes actors like Judy Greer, Jeff Daniels, Nathan Fillion, Kate Mulgrew, and Steven Weber. All I'm saying is, what's it take to get a Bigfoot movie with that kind of talent made?

"The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot" did land Sam Elliot, and as recently as 2021, we've seen true-crime docuseries like "Sasquatch" tackle Bigfoot-related subject matter. But Cornish may be onto something with his talk of the need for a "prestige, sophisticated, super f****** great" Bigfoot movie (the existence of which is as elusive as Bigfoot itself). He concluded by revealing his personal connection to a place tangential to the famous Patterson–Gimlin film, which allegedly showed a real-life Bigfoot in the wild:

"[Bigfoot is] such a pervasive myth, and when I watch those things, the good ones really send a shiver up my spine in a way that no other contemporary mythology does. Weirdly, when I was a kid, I went on holiday to California and I stayed with my uncle who worked in a saw mill in Yakima, Washington. It turned out it was the same sawmill that guy Bob Heironimus worked at, who was one of the guys that people say was in the suit in the Roger Patterson film. Anyway, listen, man, you don't want to get me started on this s***. We'll be here all night."