#173 – SMALLTOWN MONSTERS

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow sit down with Seth Breedlove, the Ohio-based documentary filmmaker behind the Small Town Monsters production company. Since 2015, Seth has been cranking out roughly two cryptozoology documentaries per year — all crowd-funded, all focused on the way monster sightings ripple through the communities where they occur. His latest film at the time of this episode is 🎬 The Bray Road Beast 💵, a documentary about the dogman sightings clustered around a six-mile stretch of rural road just outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin.

Blake frames the episode as the first of at least two (possibly three) planned installments on this topic, noting that dogman and werewolf reports represent a curious shift in cryptozoology — away from flesh-and-blood biological explanations and back toward the overtly paranormal. The show promises a more critical deep-dive in follow-up episodes, potentially including an interview with Linda Godfrey, the journalist and author most responsible for bringing the Beast of Bray Road to public attention.

🐺 What Is the Beast of Bray Road?

The core sightings date to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when multiple witnesses in the Elkhorn area reported encounters with a large, upright-walking canid — roughly six to seven feet tall, grayish-black fur, and unsettlingly bright eyes. Unlike the shambling ambiguity of most Bigfoot reports, these encounters tended toward the aggressive: witnesses described the creature chasing their vehicles, raking claws along car bodies, and eating roadkill on the roadside. Seth highlights three witnesses whose accounts became the public face of the flap: Lori Endrizzi (considered the first official sighting, who described the creature eating roadkill and said locking eyes with it felt like “looking at the devil himself”), Doris Gipson (who hit something on Halloween night and had claw marks raked down her trunk), and Tom Brichta (whose account, Seth notes, attracted some skepticism when additional details were added later).

An earlier sighting anchor comes from 1936, when a groundskeeper at the St. Coletta’s Institute reportedly saw a werewolf-like figure walking off an Indian burial mound and muttering the word “Gadara” — a detail Seth credits as one of the two things that convinced him to make the film at all.

🔍 Skeptical Angles and Mundane Explanations

Seth is refreshingly candid that the creature “biologically makes no sense,” and the conversation covers the rational explanations the film presents without fully endorsing any of them:

– Mange-affected bears, which can look startlingly unlike a healthy bear
– Large wolves or coywolves, particularly as wolf populations have been repopulating in Wisconsin
– A hoaxer in a costume (though Seth drily notes that wandering Bray Road at night in a werewolf mask invites its own hazards from armed local farmers)
– Social contagion: once sightings become public, new reports flood in — some likely genuine misidentifications, some perhaps retrofitted memories

Blake raises the “scripted monster” phenomenon — the observable correlation between high-profile werewolf films and subsequent sighting waves — pointing to 1981’s twin releases of 🎬 The Howling 💵 and 🎬 An American Werewolf in London 💵 as a potential cultural priming event worth investigating.

👁️ The Occult Turn

The documentary’s most unexpected development came during an interview with John Fredrickson, who maintained what he called a “werewolf file” of regional sightings. Fredrickson’s material — heavy with occult associations, the Gadara incident, and reports suggesting the creature had a demonic rather than biological character — completely reshaped the film’s tone. What had been planned as a straightforward Hammer Horror-inflected werewolf documentary became something stranger, with quick-cut editing, stylized darkened interview chambers, and candlelit backgrounds standing in for the cozy gothic atmosphere Seth had originally envisioned.

Seth also teases a phenomenon he says Linda Godfrey told him about but that didn’t make the film: people waking up in the middle of the night to find the dogman standing in their bedroom — a detail Blake immediately flags as resonant with sleep paralysis phenomenology.

🏚️ Small Towns and Their Monsters

A substantial part of the conversation is about what Seth’s films are really about: not proving or disproving creatures, but documenting how monster-outbreak folklore shapes (and is shaped by) the communities where it erupts. Some towns lean in — Whitehall, New York now hosts an annual Sasquatch Festival that traces directly back to Seth’s Beast of Whitehall premiere. Flatwoods, West Virginia sold out its local theater when Flatwoods Monster screened, with the fire chief shutting the doors at capacity. Minerva, Ohio had largely forgotten the Minerva Monster entirely before Seth’s film; witness Howie Caton, who had endured ridicule for decades, told Seth that everything since the film’s release had been positive — including the day his coworkers showed up en masse wearing Minerva Monster t-shirts.

Elkhorn is the outlier: the town wants nothing to do with the Beast of Bray Road. No t-shirts in the local gift shop, no Linda Godfrey books, essentially no acknowledgment. A member of the actual Bray family (the road is named for them) told Seth on camera that he doesn’t see any commercial value in it. Seth jokes — then immediately regrets — that the obvious explanation is that the town is full of Satanists.

The broader pattern Seth describes: local monster legends live or die on whether the community chooses to celebrate them. If the town closes ranks, the story dies on the vine within a generation. Blake connects this to the Stull, Kansas “gateway to hell” legend as a cautionary counterexample — a community that can’t shake an unwanted legend and has suffered real harm (stolen and vandalized grave markers) from the resulting tourism.

🎬 Making the Film: Craft and Commerce

Seth walks through the production realities of genuinely independent cryptozoology filmmaking:

– The first Small Town Monsters film, Minerva Monster, was made for under $500; the second, Beast of Whitehall, for under $1,000
– Annual Kickstarter campaigns have grown from $6,500 (2015) to $36,000 (the year before this episode), funding everything
– Seth edits all the films himself, learning on the job since Beast of Whitehall; he transcribes every interview immediately as his primary editorial tool
– The Beast of Bray Road’s werewolf costume cost roughly $40 total: a modified $6 Amazon mask, a bodysuit, and eyes made from reflective bicycle tape (not CGI)
– Animation and VFX come from collaborators: Santino Vitale handled the moving-illustration sequences (including the Greek mythology opener and the Beast of Gévaudan storybook segment); Chris Scalf produced the found-footage-style animation
– Distribution is primarily through Amazon and Amazon Prime; DVD sales offer better margins but Amazon is where the audience finds the films

Seth also mentions upcoming projects: a Bigfoot first-person documentary (On the Trail of Bigfoot), a winged-cryptids film (Terror in the Skies, covering the Piasa, the Lawndale thunderbird sighting, and the Chicago Mothman), and a long-awaited Momo the Missouri Monster documentary.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Beast of Bray Road: Tailing Wisconsin’s Werewolf 💵 by Linda Godfrey
– 🎬 The Bray Road Beast 💵 — Small Town Monsters documentary directed by Seth Breedlove
– 🎬 The Howling 💵 directed by Joe Dante
– 🎬 An American Werewolf in London 💵 directed by John Landis
– 🎬 The Fog 💵 directed by John Carpenter (referenced for its distinctive red-eyed visual style, which inspired the Beast’s eye color in the documentary)
– 🎬 The Hound of the Baskervilles 💵 (Hammer, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) — Seth’s favorite Hammer film
– 🎬 The Curse of the Werewolf 💵 (Hammer, starring Oliver Reed; based on 📚 The Werewolf of Paris 💵 by Guy Endore)
– 🎬 The Devil Rides Out 💵 (Hammer, with Christopher Lee as the hero; based on a Dennis Wheatley novel)

🔗 Related Links

– Small Town Monsters — official website
– Beast of Bray Road (Wikipedia)
– Linda Godfrey (Wikipedia)
– Michigan Dogman (Wikipedia)
– Beast of Gévaudan (Wikipedia)
– Lycaon — Greek werewolf mythology (Wikipedia)
– Flatwoods Monster (Wikipedia)
– Mothman / Point Pleasant (Wikipedia)

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

Since 2015, Seth Breedlove has been producing documentaries about cryptozoology and the impact that a cluster of monster sightings can have on a small town. His latest film is The Bray Road Beast, and Seth joins us to discuss the peculiar aspects of the creature that some have called a werewolf, a dog-man or even a demonic entity.

Of Interest

• The Bray Road Beast trailer
• Small Town Monsters streaming on Amazon
• John Carpenter’s The Fog in 4K limited release
• Small Town Monsters (official website)

Music

• Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys