The 1970s, a decade marked by the shadows of Vietnam and Watergate, saw a public questioning established truths, and a burgeoning appetite for the strange and unexplained. This cultural shift provided fertile ground for a unique brand of filmmaking: the "weirdumentary." Utah-based Sunn Classic Pictures became a powerhouse by producing and distributing partially dramatized documentaries that explored subjects like UFOs, cryptozoology, and psychic phenomena, turning what many dismissed as pseudoscience into significant box office success.
James L. Conway, who worked extensively with Sunn Classic, recalls the era as a time when "people just questioning what the norm was… what is real, what isn't real." With limited media outlets compared to today, theatrical films offered a unique window into these unusual subjects. "If you wanted to see something that was on the unusual side, it was a theatrical motion picture," Conway told IGN.
Sunn Classic’s trajectory began after Charles E. Sellier Jr., an industrial film producer, connected with the company. Sunn, initially a distributor of hunting films like The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, found a winning formula with a re-edited version of the 1970 German documentary Chariots of the Gods. Based on Erich von Däniken's theories of ancient alien influence, the film grossed over $25 million and earned an Academy Award nomination, signaling a mainstream acceptance of such ideas.
Film scholar Dr. Gary D. Rhodes, author of Weirdumentary, identifies Chariots of the Gods as a pivotal work. "The fact that it was nominated for an Academy Award suggests how many more people were taking these ideas seriously," Rhodes noted. He observed a cultural rise in interest in occultism, psychic phenomena, and New Age philosophies from the late 1960s onward, a desire for "alternate ways of examining our experiences that is unique to that era."
Sunn Classic capitalized on this trend with a slate of popular films. The Mysterious Monsters (1975), hosted by Peter Graves, presented a collection of cryptids, including Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Yeti. This film was an amalgamation of earlier television documentaries and notably featured footage of the purported Bigfoot encounter captured by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin. "If this film is legitimate, then there can no longer be any question about Bigfoot’s existence," Graves narrated.
Due to the company's Mormon roots, Sunn Classic aimed for family-friendly content. This demographic, termed "the lost audience" by Sellier, felt underserved by both children's films and the more mature productions of New Hollywood. Sunn’s output even included films that sought to provide evidence for Christian tenets, such as In Search of Noah’s Ark (1976). Co-written and directed by Conway, the film explored theories about the resting place of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat, presenting a photograph as a key piece of evidence.
Conway defended the presentation of evidence in these films, stating, "We didn't doctor anything… we had a photo that had been in other pieces of research." He acknowledged that many people readily accepted the presented research because they wanted to believe. Rhodes noted the persistent allure of potential evidence, even when the claims were questionable.
Sunn Classic employed innovative marketing strategies, including extensive market research to gauge public interest and a distribution method called "four-walling." This involved renting entire theaters and controlling ticket sales, allowing them to invest heavily in television advertising. Conway explained, "We would only have, let's say, 300 prints of the movie. It would go into a city like Chicago, play two nights at this one theater, three nights at a different theater, four nights at another theater, and the commercials would list all the different movie theaters it was going to be on each night." This strategy proved highly effective; In Search of Noah’s Ark, with a budget of $600,000, grossed $55 million, making it the ninth highest-grossing film of 1976.
Rhodes praised four-walling as a "brilliant strategy," combining old theatrical practices with ahead-of-their-time market research, including polling at shopping malls. The success of these films was so significant that theater owners eventually pushed Sunn Classic back to the standard box office revenue split, which was less favorable for the production company.
Producer Alan Landsburg adapted this successful formula for television with the In Search of… docuseries, hosted by Leonard Nimoy, which ran from 1976 to 1982. Conway felt that Landsburg’s series, which covered similar subjects like extraterrestrials and myths, had effectively “ripped off” Sunn’s earlier theatrical efforts.
While other films like The Hellstrom Chronicle and UFOs: Past, Present, and Future also explored unusual topics, Rhodes asserts that "Sunn Classic was at the core of the weirdumentary." The enduring appeal of these films, Conway suggested, was that "belief was not essential." He shared that his own beliefs sometimes shifted based on interviews, as with Beyond and Back concerning life after death, while other projects left him with less conviction.
Sunn Classic also implemented audience testing, using viewers with dials to gauge reactions to film segments, and then adjusting the editing accordingly. Rhodes highlighted the ingenuity of directors like Conway, who could achieve impressive special effects on low budgets, citing The Bermuda Triangle (1979) as an example, which used eerie lighting and sound to depict the disappearance of Flight 19.
Despite critical reception, such as Variety’s dismissal of The Bermuda Triangle as "silly, unconvincing," Rhodes argues that Sunn Classic "had perfected an art form, a very profitable art form, crystallizing a new genre for a new age."
Eventually, the mainstreaming of conspiracies and paranormal subjects, fueled by blockbuster films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Amityville Horror, diminished the novelty that made Sunn Classic's approach so successful. Hollywood’s realization of the popularity of these themes led to their proliferation across various media. "Once Hollywood realized how popular these subjects were, they were suddenly everywhere," Conway observed. "When they first happened, they fed on each other… You can only do so many ghost stories, so many UFO things."
Even today, audiences continue to engage with themes popularized during the weirdumentary era, seen in current programming on channels like the Discovery and History Channels, as well as numerous podcasts and blogs. Despite debunking, such as the revelation of rehearsal footage for the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot suit in Capturing Bigfoot, public fascination persists.
Rhodes attributes this enduring interest to a combination of nostalgia and a continued desire for tantalizing possibilities. "There's always one more piece of possible evidence to be tantalizing," he said. "From a historical film perspective, these movies are fun," Rhodes concluded. "There's a nostalgia factor. James Conway, Charles Sellier, Alan Landsburg, Wheeler Dixon… they're heroes to me. They made incredibly fun movies, even if I disbelieve the subjects."