Wild Men: Masculinity in ‘Harry and the Hendersons’
For the most part, Bigfoot has had it pretty rough in his cinematic career. While there are some gems out there — both ones that have achieved cult status like Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), others like the dreadful-but-watchable Creature of Black Lake (1976) that are all-but-forgotten and ones like Exists (2014) that just slipped under the radar, they’re always a gamble. Even the ones that succeed often only do so to varying degrees. Some have a great atmosphere, but a terrible Bigfoot, others vice versa. Because so many people claim to have seen the creature, getting the look right in a Sasquatch movie has proven to be incredibly difficult.
Very few cinematic monsters ever have that problem, with so many people having very specific ideas about what the creature should look like. At the same time, so many Bigfoot features are done so cheaply that the vast majority of them look barely a step above store-bought Halloween costumes. That’s the root of the issue for most Bigfoot fare. Whether it looks accurate or not shouldn’t matter if there’s nothing to base it off of. The only make-or-break thing is whether or not it looks real to an audience.
For that very particular reason and a few others, Harry and the Hendersons (1987) might genuinely be the best Bigfoot movie ever made. Rick Baker created the most impressive Sasquatch ever committed to film. He did for Bigfoot what he’d previously done for werewolves in An American Werewolf in London (1981). This is an expressive, intelligent, totally realistic gentle giant. It looks as if Bigfoot were plucked out of the wild and delivered right into the viewer’s home — which is obviously exactly the intent.
The late Kevin Peter Hall deserves so much credit as well for bringing so much of that raw compassion to the character, made all the more impressive by the fact that he played Harry the same year that he brought another cinematic monster icon with none of those traits to life in Predator.
One of the things that’s so great about Harry and the Hendersons is that it starts off feeling very much like a horror film. From the opening shot of Bigfoot’s POV tracking through the forest, it feels like a creature feature. It’s a monster movie through most of the first act, up until the moment that the Hendersons are forced out of their own house and can only watch as this creature starts wandering through their home. Like any large, wild animal, he’s causing a bit of a rampage, but it’s the moment when Harry finds the hunting trophies and is horrified of them that changes everything.
Even if it’s a family comedy, Harry and the Hendersons is loaded with gags and scares until that scene. There’s Bigfoot roaring into the camera as he wakes up on the roof of the car, and then the sequence revealing him via flashlight in a darkened garage. But when George Henderson has to look through the window and see how horrified this thing he thought he killed is with the idea of him killing animals for sport, that’s when the whole point of the film becomes clear.
Harry and the Hendersons isn’t remotely subtle in its approach and, as a family comedy, it would probably be a mistake if it tried to be. This is heightened, whimsical and goofy. But at the same time, it’s truly, truly heartfelt. Both in terms of the characters and in terms of the larger themes, this is a film that’s all about identifying with the monster while taking an honest glance at humanity as a whole. There is a distinctive and unapologetic vegetarian bent to it, but more than that it’s about this notion of pretending to be civilized, building homes and holding down jobs to pretend we’re more than just predators, and completely dismantling that. It’s about rich, civilized city people who believe that being a man means getting in touch with your inner predator. That manhood is primal and aggressive, that a man finds his primitive roots in violence. And then they meet an actual Wild Man who could not be further from the made up predator they’d been role-playing.
George is a hunter from the first moment. We’re introduced to him by watching him take pride in his son Ernie’s first kill. That’s an incredibly specific introduction. There’s an alpha maleness to George that he’s trying to impart on Ernie because that was the relationship he had with his own father. It’s ingrained in George that kids are meant to carry on their dad’s legacy, to the point that he’s being groomed to take over his dad’s sporting goods store. Harry is the perfect counterpoint to all of this. He’s this mythic beast, depicted in artwork and statues as a snarling predator, portrayed as this carnivorous creature — yet he’s as gentle as can be. He’s a vegetarian even though there’s likely no way he could possibly sustain that diet.
Harry’s the quintessential gentle giant and that allows George to take an inward look at himself, at why he’s so devoted to hunting, to “manhood,” and if he even takes any real joy in it other than as an outlet to prove his macho-ness, or as something that’s simply been ingrained in men for generations, passed down from father to son as he was so ready to do with Ernie. There are even great moments in which Ernie will make some joke about violence with a great big grin and not get why his dad won’t laugh anymore, because this is just something he’s doing for the sake of approval, the same way George did — and even continues to do throughout the feature — with his own father.
A lot of the best stuff in Harry and the Hendersons comes down to not just belief in what kind of person and what kind of father George wants to be, but a very personal belief. The family doesn’t take long to realize that this is indeed Bigfoot that they’ve hit with their car. But accepting that takes a little bit longer. Some of the best bits in Harry are devoted to pointing out the cultural preconceptions about Sasquatch and subverting them at every turn. Everyone thinks of a monster, but Harry is the least aggressive character in the entire film. The big game hunter Jacques LaFleur has created this elaborate rivalry in his own mind: ultimate hunter becoming the ultimate prey. He wants to kill Bigfoot not just for the fame, but for the honor of killing the most powerful, mysterious beast in the animal kingdom. He has not only given in to all of the pop culture perceptions of Bigfoot, he has projected this creature as the end goal of his own masculinity. By mounting Bigfoot’s head on his wall, he won’t just be a hunter, he will be the hunter, he will be the man.
His pursuit of Harry — which has lasted several years by the point the film even begins — is so relentless that he actually pushes Harry to consider doing it. The best part of all this is that Jacques doesn’t even get that for a moment. He never observed Bigfoot’s incredibly laid back lifestyle so when he finally encounters this thing and it’s ready to kill him, he just assumes that he’s always been right about everything. It’s not until Harry reveals how pathetically terrified Jacques actually is that he walks away and, essentially, proves himself the better man.
This whole theme of perception and belief is best represented by Don Ameche’s Wallace Woodright, who is in some ways the most touching character in the whole movie. Unlike every other character, Woodright is the only who truly has spent his life believing that Bigfoot genuinely is this gentle giant, he is so close to seeing Bigfoot the way we, through Harry, know him to be. Not coincidentally, he is also the most sensitive and soft-spoken man in the film. But he’s stopped believing. Woodright’s “there are no Bigfeet” speech as Harry is revealed to be standing behind him is, in a lot of ways, the heart of the picture as a whole.
At the end of the day, though, Harry and the Hendersons is still more than anything a feel-good romp that happens to star Bigfoot, almost automatically making it one of the best of its type by default. But thanks to its execution, fun performances and especially Rick Baker’s makeup design, it’s also very possibly the best Bigfoot feature of all time. It spawned a TV series that lasted over 70 episodes — in which Kevin Peter Hall returned to play Harry until his passing in 1991 — as well as toys, trading cards, apparel and more. It’s not just a kids’ movie, a comedy or a Bigfoot flick. Instead, for over thirty years, it has proved to be a lasting member of the family, and one for which we should all be grateful.
