Jon Garcia gifts us with Summoning the Spirit, a captivating tale that really makes you wonder if Big Foot is really out there.
Summoning the Spirit follows Carla (Krystal Millie Valdes) and Dean (Ernesto Reyes, “American Gods”) as they decide to escape the hustle of the big city, purchasing a home in the remote forest. They have big plans for their new quiet life, only to find something much more sinister. The couple quickly realize that they are on the land of a cult, and the leader claims a telepathic connection to a legendary flesh-eating beast deep in the woods surrounding them. Carla and Dean are forced to uncover the terrifying truth of the cult’s prophecy.
The film, written by Jon Garcia and Zach Carter and directed by Garcia, premiered to rave reviews at the Miami Film Festival with Blair Witch Project producer Greg Hale says of the film, “[Summoning the Spirit] is a great addition to the sub-sub-genre of Bigfoot horror. The film turns convention on its head with a fresh take on Sasquatch while still delivering on the fun and the scares.”
The film is produced by Dark Star president Michael Repsch, Joe Jatcko, Lacy Todd and executive produced by Carla Berkowitz (Critical Thinking), six-time Tony Award winner Jim Kierstead, three-time Emmy nominee William Fernandez and Michael Rubin.
Check out our interview with Jon:
So, you’re the director and the co-writer for this film. Had you worked with Zack Carter prior to Summoning the Spirit?
Jon: Yeah, it’s kind of funny. When I moved to Portland, I moved here to play music and that went on for a few years and then I went to film school and like, right after film school, I wanted to make a feature film and I literally put up a Craigslist ad and he answered it. So did four or five other people and that’s how I found my crew for my first movie, Tandem Hearts. And Zack was there for like a year and a half when I was doing Tandem Hearts, he did a number of things, but he was there like while I was learning how to make movies and we got pretty close over the course of a year and a half, making this movie on weekends. And from then on, he was kind of just a part of all the little indie films I did. So yeah, we’ve worked together before, but we hadn’t written anything together before, so this was a departure. I think during the pandemic, we just connected, you know, and we talked about this idea and developed it over the course of the pandemic. And that was the first feature I did after things started to come back to life.
Well, that’s awesome. I’m glad that you were able to foster that working friendship for all these projects.
Jon: Yeah, it’s cool that Portland ended up being this place where you can make movies. I mean, like a lot of places, but Portland seems to just be a really nurturing place to make movies. And so we just kept doing that and you know, he’s made his own features to add to that. I think we all just kind of learned how to do it together.
I don’t know anything about Sasquatch, so why Sasquatch? What about the lore drove you to create a whole film around it?
Jon: Living in the Pacific Northwest it’s really hard to avoid Bigfoot and anything and everything Bigfoot, bumper stickers, like there’s a Bigfoot museum out here. It’s just he’s, he, she is just everywhere. I always wanted to make a Creature Feature and watched a ton of them when I was a kid. Besides that, I mean, I’d heard of sightings in Texas, you know, and I always thought that Bigfoot was more of a Pacific Northwest type creature, but the more I researched about Bigfoot, you find out there’s places all around the United States that are “squashy,” as they say, and so it was fun to just start researching Bigfoot. And I had a few friends that were in the Bigfoot community, one that is actually like a full time Bigfooter and I actually had a chance to go bigfooting with him and kind of watch them work and see how they go out and try to find a Sasquatch. It was really interesting and pretty inspiring. And yeah, I think just over the course of the pandemic, we just kept passing the script back and forth and trying to decide what the story was going to be. I also had a fascination with cults and I think just researching both the Bigfoot nuts and bolts and also various different cults, I was just trying to put together a story that felt like it could work between those two different ideas.
So to clarify, Sasquatch and Bigfoot are the same thing, correct?
Jon: Yeah, Sasquatch and Bigfoot are the same thing. There’s some people that believe that they’re all the same, like a Yeti is also the Abominable Snowman, they’re all like similar species or the same creature. There’s a lot of little nuts and bolts, I guess you could say. Like for instance with extraterrestrials, they say that there’s always sightings around military bases because an extraterrestrial being would want to know where our military is and things like that. And for Bigfoot, they say there’s around 800 Bigfoot in the world or so. And a lot of them are in Northern California and there’s some up here in the Pacific Northwest.
Now where I stand on Bigfoot, I leave some space for that. I can’t say if I truly believe in Sasquatch or not but when I went out Sasquatching with these professional Sasquatchers, it was interesting because apparently, and I put this in the movie, but the way to call Sasquatch, apparently, is you have a l mallet of some kind and you hit it against the tree and it’ll reverb throughout the forest and then you wait for a callback or like a response back which will be another knock. Whether or not any of that was real or not, it was still pretty fun to go out in the forest with these folks and watch them do their Bigfoot calls and things like that. We went out there in the forest in Boring Oregon, about 45 minutes away from Portland and we went in two different groups. Now our group, nothing happened, you know, but in the other group that our producer Lacy (Todd) was in, they had two knock backs and one was at eye level and the other one was up in the trees. They came back a little frazzled. I thought that was kind of interesting. And before we left, they found about 10 prints, and it was hard to really tell because it was dark, you know, which was the other kind of scary part about going out into the woods. I thought we’re gonna go out during the day, you know, to go look for Sasquatch, but apparently the best thing to do is to go at night, and it was just kind of freaky and fun, you know, but I saw a few prints that actually were pretty convincing.
That’s so interesting. I’m in Ohio, so I’ve heard a lot of the Appalachian folklore and we’re taught you don’t go in the woods, especially at night, and if you hear knocking, no you didn’t. So that’s interesting that you all willingly went into the woods and especially at night.
Jon: Yeah, I was mostly scared of mountain lions. That’s what I kept on thinking about. But Ohio is a squashy place too, they have the Ohio Howl. It’s apparently a Sasquatch caught on a recording of a howl in a regular neighborhood. In this recording you can hear like a dog barking in the foreground, but in the background you hear what sounds like a siren. And that’s why when I was trying to find sounds for my Sasquatch, I let our Sasquatch, the guy who’s playing Sasquatch, Sean (Sisson), listen to that howl and then he would emulate it and try some things out. But yeah, that’s the famous recording that apparently got the believers to believe.
So, when you were filming and having the actor emulate the Sasquatch call, did any believers wander onto your film set?
Jon: No, I don’t think so. I think just meeting up with the Sasquatch group beforehand was the only time I actually, no, I take that back. I did talk to a documentarian who made a documentary about Bigfoot sightings beforehand, and I went to a Bigfoot convention. There were some people willing to chat with me and some that weren’t as open to it. There was a Bigfoot convention out here in the Northwest, of course, in Washington and I met several people that believed in some scientific proof that there are Sasquatch out there. It’s a tight community and a community I didn’t want to offend in some way, you know, and I think once some of them realized that I was making a movie about a supernatural Bigfoot, they were a little bit more distant about it, because a lot of folks believe that the Sasquatch is a primate that just eats, sleeps, poops and that’s what they do. It’s like a gorilla. And then there’s this whole belief about if there are Sasquatch out there and we’ve never seen a full skeleton and remains of Sasquatch that it must be interdimensional or must be this creature with powers, you know? And that’s kind of the route that we went and so we started borrowing from– even for the cult, you know, like Taoism and Buddhism, even Catholicism and we kind of tried to create a mythology that made some sense to us while keeping Sasquatch like this metaphysical creature that protects the forest and especially this specific area of the forest, that for Carla and Dean is like, in the middle of the woods. And so yeah, there was just a lot of creating as we go while using a little bit of those nuts and bolts and stuff just helps us tell our story.
That’s awesome. Yeah, it’s definitely a creature that I’m not familiar with, but I kind of want to know more. And I like how your film did leave it up in the air as to whether or not we should believe that it exists.
Jon: Making a Sasquatch movie is definitely a departure from anything I’ve ever done before. A lot of my films are dramas, a lot of relationship dramas. So it was kind of, like, how do I want to approach this and we wanted it to be kind of light handed. I’ve heard some reviews and seen some reviews where they mentioned that the movie’s unintentionally funny, but we were actually trying to make it as light as we could. But I make dramas, predominantly, and so there’s a little bit of that relationship drama in there as well. And then creating a mythology where a Sasquatch is regenerated throughout time by human beings was kind of, you know, I don’t know, I guess verdicts still out, but it was something like, is this going to work? Are people going to buy into the story? On paper, it’s very different as opposed to when you put it to real life and have actors and somebody in a big suit, you know? I had an acting and movement coach that I’ve worked with, because I’m also an actor, and she does a lot of animal work and I studied with her in Chicago. The animal work was really fun and really cool and the basis of it was to find your true self. Like we’re all animals, you know, they’d have us pick an animal and crawl on the ground first by ourselves and then we started interacting with the other people and all the creatures they created and before you knew it, the men and the women had split into two different groups and the men were like bumping their chests almost like in this tribal type way. It was interesting and so we had that same movement coach work with our cult members and then we also had her work with our Sasquatch just to do things like walk through the forest in like, you know, what’s the homeostasis of the creature you created? Like, how do they walk through the forest? What are they actually doing? What are they looking for? It was cool to have a basis for that, for both the cult and for the Sasquatch and to try to find the realities for everybody in the film. Like most films, you are the stories, and you kind of create as you go and like the realities that people bring into the situation can kind of become what it is.
Before I let you go, what’s up next for you? With all of that said, would you like to explore these types of films more?
Jon: Yeah, I received a script recently for another horror film and I’m hoping I get more because I really had a lot of fun with the practical effects, the pyrotechnics, the choreography, I mean, to fit all those aspects into a little indie film like that was hard. It was very hard to shoot. But it was fun. And I learned a ton, you know, but the next couple of things that I’m working on are different. One is a mixed martial arts movie that I’ve been working on for years and it’s about two guys that are fighting. They’re brothers who are fighting underground fights and they’re trying to fight sanction fights in lieu of this sort of seedy backdrop you know, they’re trying to crawl out of that and have a career as sanction fighters. It’s also a Latin movie, like Summoning the Spirit is but it’s kind of a departure for me as well. I’m looking forward to trying new things. It’s come a long way since these first few films I made were mostly dramas, you know, two people in a room, dialogue driven, which I love to do as well. Yeah, so there’s that one, and there’s another one where, in the near future, if you break somebody’s heart, you’re responsible for helping them get over you. It’s like a government mandate program where you can subpoena somebody who’s broken your heart and they have to show up to a weekend retreat, and help you get over them. By the end of the retreat, either that person will be in love with you or you’ll no longer be in love with them. I’m excited for that one too, it’s more sci-fi. Yeah, I kind of want to be playing around more in the genre spaces going forward, for now.
