You’ve probably never heard of the Bigfoot horror movie Sasqua, made and released in the 1970s but completely lost to the sands of time. It’s a story that filmmaker John Campopiano (Pennywise: The Story of IT, Snapper: The Man-Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made) is gearing up to tell in Sasqua: The Lost Bigfoot Film of Massachusetts, a new documentary that’s now in the works from Providence-based production company Atomic Clock.

Described by The Boston Globe as “an obscure horror movie about a hippie commune attacked by cryptids,” the elusive Sasqua has never seen the light of day outside of a brief and localized theatrical release back in the 1970s, and Campopiano has set out to uncover as much information, and as many relevant interview subjects, as he possibly can.

The film itself, unfortunately, is considered completely and entirely lost at this point in time, with only very grainy old trailer footage surfacing on YouTube over the years. Directed by Channon Scot, Sasqua was filmed in and around Lowell, Massachusetts in the early 1970s, and Campopiano’s ultimate dream is to not only tell the story but also find the missing film.

In his own way, you could say, Campopiano is on the hunt for Bigfoot.

The Boston Globe notes in their report on the project, “If you have any insight about it, John Campopiano and his crew of investigators would like to know. The group is on a quest to track down long-lost film reels of the homegrown monster flick and hoping to speak to people who have watched or helped produce it for their upcoming documentary.”

Campopiano tells The Boston Globe, “There’s all kinds of things that can happen to a film. It could be misfiled in a film archive somewhere, so it’s on a shelf where no one thinks to look for it. It could be in someone’s basement, or maybe it was thrown out by mistake. Maybe it burned up in a fire. I don’t know. Nobody seems to know.”

Coming soon, Sasqua: The Lost Bigfoot Film of Massachusetts looks to be a sort of spiritual companion piece to Snapper: The Man-Eating Turtle Movie That Never Got Made, which is now streaming on SCREAMBOX. Campopiano has a clear passion for regional horror cinema that’s fallen through the cracks over the years, becoming a sort of cinema cryptozoologist along the way. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more about this project, which is now filming locally.

Campopiano’s co-producer and co-writer on the doc is Matt Spry.