Movies
Wild Man of the Navidad (V)
“With the help of co-producer Kim Henkel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Graves and Meeks have embraced the cinematic tone of the 1970s with confidence. Stylistically, it’s a seamless foray into the retro world of drive-in exploitation. With a creepier monster and some better scares, The Wild Man of the Navidad could have been a post-modern masterpiece.”
Steeped in the 1970s aesthetic of faux-documentaries like The Legend of Boggy Creek, directors Duane Graves and Justin Meeks have crafted a down home, corn pone variation of the Bigfoot legend, a “based on true events” yarn about a dangerous man-creature that terrorizes the bottoms of the Navidad River outside of Sublime,
Texas.
Early on, an aggressively baritone narrator provides a brief oral history of the Wild Man of the Navidad, assuring the audience that the story that follows—taken from the personal journals of one Dale S. Rogers—is completely true. Co-director Justin Meeks plays Dale, an unemployed welder in over-alls and black horn-rims who favors a Jeffrey Combs’ grimace as his primary method of self-expression. Unable to afford medication for his crippled wife, Dale decides to lease portions of his land to day hunters for a hefty fee. Hunting season has just begun, and Dale’s got several prime river-bottom acres that are rich with game.
But Dale knows that the Wild Man prowls the lower bottoms of the Navidad River. The decision to let hunters onto his property begins to weigh heavily on his conscience. Every night at 9 pm, Dale leaves a dead deer fetus on his porch step, as a sacrifice to the Wild Man. The Wild Man approaches the house, crunches on the deer fetus, and leaves Dale a bone-and-rawhide token in return. Their generations-old arrangement has kept the Wild Man at bay for years. But as gun-crazy hunters begin to invade the Wild Man’s territory, the trust is broken, and the Wild Man is forced to retaliate.
With their desolate Texas exteriors and brilliantly cluttered interiors, the filmmakers provide a tangible and amusing glimpse into the idiosyncratic Southern lifestyle. Too bad The Wild Man of the Navidad is so deliberately paced, with several rambling discussions regarding moonshine and homemade distilleries filling the ample time between Wild Man attack scenes. But much like with the previously mentioned Boggy Creek, the directors emphasize atmosphere above all else, a decision that helps the audience overlook the slow pace, stilted acting and cheesy violence.
The Wild Man of the Navidad is more successful during its first third, when the titular creature is a thing of blur and shadow. As more of the monster is revealed during later attack scenes, its fur-clad bulk and antlers-for-hands are goofily reminiscent of Those We Do Not Speak Of from The Village.
With the help of co-producer Kim Henkel (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), Graves and Meeks have embraced the cinematic tone of the 1970s with confidence. Stylistically, it’s a seamless foray into the retro world of drive-in exploitation. With a creepier monster and some better scares, The Wild Man of the Navidad could have been a post-modern masterpiece.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
You must be logged in to post a comment.