Since the 1990s, Animal Planet has been a haven for animal lovers. Yet over time, the cable channel’s objective evolved to include more than just conventional nature docs and series. It was toward the end of the 2000s when these changes began to crop up, including what seemed like the network’s most antithetical programming at the time: Lost Tapes.
After years of focusing on real and confirmed creatures, Animal Planet experimented with pseudoscience. In hindsight, Lost Tapes was a sign of things to come, seeing as how cryptozoology went from niche to mainstream in the 2010s. For instance, Finding Bigfoot, one of Animal Planet’s highest-rated programs, was only a few years away at that point. And how can we forget the controversial documentary, Mermaids: The Body Found?
Lost Tapes, on the other hand, didn’t waste your time like Finding Bigfoot and other similar shows. No, you were guaranteed to see a weird beastie or monster of some kind in every episode of this mockumentary, even if it was nothing more than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of moment. Not to mention, those darting shadows and peripheral figures were quite fearsome.
It was the night before Halloween of 2008 when Animal Planet delivered a sneak preview of Lost Tapes, ahead of its official season premiere the following January. Gateway episodes “Chupacabra” and “Bigfoot” tackled two of the best-known cryptids in North America, as well as established the series’ format. Using a combination of real-life footage, reenactments, and interviews from experts, Lost Tapes quickly set itself apart from other monster hunting-type shows, such as Destination Truth.
It’s hard to be fooled by something like Lost Tapes, especially when every episode opens with the lines “the presence of hidden creatures is the subject of continued debate” and “the following story is inspired by the possibility of their existence”. Right there you’re told this is a work of fiction. The style of each episode, however, submits a notion of reality that’s based on our histories with documentaries. We know better than to think any of this is real, but the presentation messes with our brains.
Found footage didn’t immediately take off after the success of The Blair Witch Project. Indeed, there were attempts to cash in on the style, but Blair Witch parodies tended to receive the most attention back then. It was only after Paranormal Activity that found footage saw a substantial resurgence not only in cinema, but also on television, albeit to a lesser degree for the latter. Lost Tapes preceded both The River and Siberia, two shows that aired on big broadcast networks. However, out of the three, only Lost Tapes lasted more than one season.
Unlike the aforementioned shows, Lost Tapes didn’t have a continuous plot. It was more in the vein of classic anthology television that focused on self-contained storytelling. And in a little under thirty minutes, you could get in and out of any given episode with no fuss. You went in knowing these were essentially miniature found-footage horror movies, and that’s exactly what you got.
A basic installment of Lost Tapes followed the routine of most cinematic found footage; a third party compiled video shot by whoever crossed paths with the unexplained. They then padded that with the contributions of cryptozoologists, scientists and folklorists, plus any real-life footage and scientific tidbits that supported the subject matter. These traumatic encounters, by the way, didn’t always end in death for the humans involved. Some escaped their ordeals, whereas plenty others disappeared.
On the same channel, you could find Cats 101 and Too Cute was now a show prefaced with a “viewer discretion is advised” warning. Seasoned horror hounds would struggle to be frightened of anything here, but fans of cheap thrills would be absolutely delighted. Those reenactments of people’s run-ins with cryptids and whatnot were the small-screen equivalent of jump-scares found inside a haunted attraction, although less coherent. Money shots of the monsters were not ever certain, either.
In the show’s humbler beginnings, you could expect to see a whole lot of nothing. A creature’s being was hinted at, or if you were lucky, briefly shown under a veil of darkness. Gruesome makeup on the actors, courtesy of artists like Scott Conner, helped drive home the ferocity of these monstrosities. However, it wasn’t until Season Two that an episode’s subject was occasionally seen in plain view. Their time on screen was, once again, limited to a matter of mere seconds, or they were conveniently obstructed. It’s understandable that the show was minimizing your seeing an obvious costume, but somehow it’s actually more effective to have cryptids, and their ilk, exist in flashes and fragments.
It was in the third and final season that Lost Tapes introduced a recurring character of sorts. That impulse to raise the ante on otherworldly matters had already happened with the Season Two episode “Alien”, but now zombies, ghosts, and the deity Quetzalcoatl had been thrown into the mix. And a few of these more out-there additions to this show’s cabinet of creepy curiosities were confronted by a group called the Enigma Corporation. This private security firm popped up every now and then, in lieu of civilians, and their presence suggested an underlying plot that, unfortunately, never got the chance to grow.
Nowadays, Lost Tapes comes across as silly and lightweight. Having said that, this show gave us a fresh and fun way of investigating cryptozoology and the paranormal on television. The artifice is easy to see through, and the episodes are formulaic, but in an age where Bigfoot and the like have been sterilized by pop culture, it’s nice to remember a time when they were depicted as mysterious and scary.
