Hunt for the Skinwalker is a 2018 paranormal documentary which I’m categorising as ‘Lovecraftian’ in a very narrow way: primarily as an artefact which is the manifestation of a particular - but ongoing - cultural event which I refer to as the contemporary ‘Lovecrafting’ of the paranormal.
Based on an earlier book by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp,
Hunt for the Skinwalker outlines ongoing ‘scientific’ investigations (or at least investigations involving physicists, chemists and biologists) - funded by billionaire Robert Bigelow - into a range seemingly bizarre and paranormal events, including: poltergeist activity; Bigfoot sightings; UFOS; the appearance of a giant, phantom prehistoric wolf; sightings of aliens (including squid-like entities); the manifestation of interdimensional portals, and the presence of the skinwalker of Native American mythology - all clustering around a ranch in Utah. This is all immediately ‘Lovecraftian’ in that it sounds like the set-up for a
Delta Green scenario; however,
Hunt for the Skinwalker is also ‘Lovecraftian’ in another, more specific (and aforementioned) sense - a sense which also marks the epistemological and ontological shift in how the category of the ‘paranormal’ has come to be conceptualised by a number of its advocates and proponents.
In this respect,
Hunt for the Skinwalker is one of those works which (to paraphrase some of Phil Hine’s comments on associated matters) engages in the decompartmentalisation of phenomena previously treated as discreet and separate in paranormal circles. Thus during one interview,
Colm Kelleher notes that the early days of the investigation into Skinwalker Ranch were guided by the assumption that what was being dealt with was extraterrestrial in nature - an assumption guided by the once dominant and supposedly-robust narrative that UFOs constitute nuts-and-bolts craft, built by physical albeit-extraterrestrial beings, and utilising technologies which would one day be revealed as comprehensible to a human understanding of the physical properties of the universe. The realisation that this model of the collective phenomena was deeply flawed - given the apparent scope and ‘high strangeness’ of the activity being monitored - thus put something of a ‘fly in the ointment’ (to use Kelleher’s words) in terms of what (if anything) was actually occuring in and around the ranch.
What the documentary thus reveals is an uncertainty concerning the ontological status of the Skinwalker phenomena which resonates deeply with that inherent in the opening lines of Lovecraft’s
The Call of Cthulhu re: the inability of the human mind to corellate its contents, especially in the light of terrifying new vistas of reality being revealed by modern science. For the Skinwalker researchers, the old narratives and certainties have been abandon, it seems, in the face of the realisation that, if the phenomena being investigated are genuine, they may fall entirely outside of a comprehensible, human franework of meaning, perhaps being tied to the fabric of reality in a way humans, given our cognitive constraints, may never fully be able to fathom. In true Lovecaftian fashion, the documentary effectively ends on the point that there may be no answers - and that reality may be far stranger than we might like to imagine.
For my part, I am highly skeptical that there is anything genuinely ‘paranormal’ to the tale of Skinwalker Ranch; most likely what we are dealing with are misidentifications and poor (if not heavily-biased) research methodologies, framed in terms extant cultural mythologies which are being remade and, crucially in relation to the above, being re-enchanted for a modern audience - but an audience which, in recent decades, has been primed by the rationalist anti-rationalism of Lovecraft’s great literary achievements - where science and the light of reason ultimately illuminate the unknowable - especially as they have made themself known in popular culture.
