1. Stephanie S. Turner, “The Place of Cryptids in Taxonomic Debates,” in Anthropology and Cryptozoology: Exploring Encounters with Mysterious Creatures, ed. Samantha Hurn (London: Routledge, 2017), 20.
2. Cryptozoological narratives also thread through other media forms, including recent novels, films, and video games. Some popular films that rely on the trope of the cryptid over the past few decades include Anaconda (Luis Llosa, 1997), The Mothman Prophecies (Mark Pellington, 2002), The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006), The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro, 2017), and The Meg (Jon Turteltaub, 2018).
3. The fascination with mythical beasts dates back to prehistory, as with many ancient mythologies across different cultures. Contemporary depictions of cryptids also have strong roots in the medieval bestiary phenomenon. More modern iterations include countless different types of stories, from folktales and fairy tales, circus sideshows, magazines, and video games, to name just a few. Like Lost Tapes, many representations from the modern era often rely on amalgamating extant animals to depict their creatures of myth, as with the monster movies in the 1930s through to the 1950s and onward that used scaled-up versions of iguanas, spiders, ants, etc. (think of The Lost World [Irwin Allen, 1960]), or as with P. T. Barnum’s infamous Feejee Mermaid hoax, a creature on sideshow display in the mid-nineteenth century that was made up of a horrifying composite of fish and monkey. A similar thread of fascination with mythic monsters can be traced across the long legacy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! multimedia phenomenon, established in 1918, which to this day makes regular blog posts about supposed cryptid sightings, prompting discussions on both their website and their YouTube channel, which similarly relies upon this tradition of animal references.
4. Examples of horror/science fiction films from the 1950s that revolved around Bigfoot/Yeti include Man Beast (Jerry Warren, 1956), The Snow Creature (W. Lee Wilder, 1954), and the Hammer horror film The Abominable Snowman (Val Guest, 1957). A flurry of Bigfoot films also appeared in the 1970s with The Legend of Boggy Creek (Charles B. Pierce, 1972), The Legend of Bigfoot (Harry Winer, 1976), Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot (Ed Ragozzino, 1976), and Creature from Black Lake (Joy N. Houck Jr., 1976), to name a few. Animated films since the 2000s in particular have popularized a more family-friendly Bigfoot/Yeti figure, including Monsters, Inc. (Pete Docter, 2001) Hotel Transylvania (Genndy Tartakovsky, 2012), Smallfoot (Karey Kirkpatrick, 2018), Missing Link (Chris Butler, 2019), and Abominable (Jill Culton, 2019).
5. Peter Dendle, “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds,” Folklore 117.2 (August 2006): 198.