Camping Out in the Haunted Balboa Theatre: Day 2 of Bigfoot Bonanza

Today is day 3 of Bigfoot Bonanza at the historic Balboa Theater here in San Francisco. This has been a productive and informative weekend for the creatures of the Overlook; about half of the monsters that contribute to the Overlook are horror fans, so many people have assumed we'd know something about Bigfoot but it's just not the case. And considering how close we live to the Willow Creek (where the famous Patterson Gimlin footage was captured) you'd think there would be a ton of Bigfooters. I honestly think the locals that attended are simply curious, whereas most of the enthusiasts have flown in.

The Balboa Theatre used to be a single screen venue that split to a du-plex in 1978. For the second day of Bigfoot Bonanza the screens were titled Tom Slick and S. Crabtree. It may seem strange that the screen on the left is marked "2" but this is simply because it's the smaller of the two screens.

About halfway through Saturday, I realized that the names used for the screens not only were important figures in the Bigfoot community but also gave a hint to the type of films playing on each screen, with S. Crabtree representing the oral storytelling side of Bigfooting which included all types of documentaries. Everything from "In Search Of" episodes to an amazing short film about the Skunk Ape called Swan Song of the Skunk Ape (10min long and on YouTube now).

Tom Slick on the other hand represents the more adventurous pulp fiction tales of exploration and manifest destiny... basically monster movies, which seemed like the spot we would be setting up camp but the larger theatre has the best balcony and was far enough back from the rest of the seating to allow soft chatter/social media updating. The brief time that we all spent in theatre 2 might have also contained a taste of the Balboa's haunted reputation...

KillDozer hanging out in our campsite.

We couldn't help but set up an unofficial meet up point/ camp site perch and just watch whatever was next.

The first speaker we were greeted with after eating lunch was a large animated man, who was speaking about the fequencey of bigfoot sightings and their respective locations, which was very interesting but the image above is actually from Friday where he presented several math equations to investigate a photo he had. The level of investment into his research was impressive and began to border on excessive. It wasn't until we learned who this speaker named Cliff Barackman was in relation to the Bigfoot community...

Cliff, it turns out, is on the far right. He is the host of the most popular Bigfoot show on TV (Bobo was also in attendance, he is on the far left). Cliff sure did mount a strong defense when speaking about Bigfoot and justifiably so as his crowds were definitely of the larger groups ranging between 40-60 fans, who all seemed to want to poke holes in his theories or simply correct him. Which I honestly feel they all failed at. Still for casual Bigfoot fans the deep theory and discussion went a little to long...

Casual Bigfoot fans.

Among some of the causal fans was a cinematographer from New York. Liam Le Guillou had come from CineQuest in San Jose (which was going on at the same time) where Painless, a film he worked on was playing. KillDozer and Math Mage were both interviewed for a film on Bigfooters he was currently working on.

The Overlook also got some footage for our YouTube channel so stay tuned for that!

I had more I wanted to cover but I'm currently missing out on the last day of the Bonanza to write it. So follow us on Instagram to stay up to date with the event. And keep an eye out for videos in the near future!

-Lord Battle