Loch Ness: Movie Review

1h 31m. Documentary,History  Directed By: John MacLaverty - Hopscotch Films, Indelible Telly

Synopsis (from Screen Scotland)

Loch Ness - They Created a Monster is a witty new take on an old Scottish story.  Using never-seen-before archival material, the film takes us back to the heyday of Loch Ness - the 1970s - and turns the cameras around to focus on the Nessie Hunters themselves - a lost world of rivalry, ridicule and rogues - where men became monstrous...

Still from Loch Ness: They Created a Monster, courtesy of The Scottish Documentary Institute

  LOCH NESS: They Created a Monster

A film about the intrepid Nessy hunters of the 1970’s and 80’s.

 On March 16, 2024, a Saturday afternoon at the Bytowne Theatre, while waiting for the Irish celebrations to begin, a group of SSO members were treated by the Scottish Government Office to They Created a Monster, a fun romp of a film about the varied personalities of the Loch Ness Monster searchers of the 1970’s and 80’s.

Sightings of a mysterious water creature and its lore go back to St. Columba’s day in the 5th Century, getting a boost through late 19th century stories and the famous but discredited (due to its miniature size) ‘Surgeon’s Photo” of 1934 (an image that still stands as the logo for the Loch Ness Centre today).   And who knows how much high-tech surveillance is being done now on Loch Ness?   

SSO “Film-goers” Liz Smith, Donald Macdonald, Lynda Muir

Though limited to a certain period in the latter half of the 20th Century, They Created a Monster captures the madcap enthusiasm from many people spending decades on this quixotic quest.

The "surgeon's photograph" of 1934, now known to have been a hoax. Reference Wikipedia Robert Kenneth Wilson.

Tim Dinsdale with his own reconstruction of the Loch Ness Monster (a clay model, held in place on a painted wooden board). I presume this photo was taken on the set of the BBC Panorama studio. Image: (c) Tim Dinsdale. Image and Caption Credit: Books on the Loch Ness Monster 3: The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness — Tetrapod Zoology (tetzoo.com)

They Created a Monster includes a mention of the famous film footage in 1960 by Aeronautical Engineer Tim Dinsdale (who tried to better this feat over the following 20 years with little luck); the history prior to that renowned film was not dealt with in the film.  Whether Dinsdale’s sighting was a dimly lit boat or Nessy herself was a matter of controversy at the time.

Caption: cover of A. Dinsdale’s 2013 book The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness. Image Credit: Books on the Loch Ness Monster 3: The Man Who Filmed Nessie: Tim Dinsdale and the Enigma of Loch Ness — Tetrapod Zoology (tetzoo.com)

Throughout the 1960’s and early 70’s, over a thousand volunteers including many hippies from outside the UK “dropped out and dropped by” to the Loch’s shores as part of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau.  The concept was to survey 80% of the Loch with telephoto cameras.

A Loch Ness Investigation Bureau Vehicle

 In 1974 an earnest American lawyer by the name of Robert Rines captured an underwater photo of one of Nessy’s “flippers”, itself hotly debated due to the photograph’s digital enhancement.

Caption: black and white versions of the two flipper photos, as shown in the usual (but technically incorrect) rotated view (they should actually be imagined rotated 180 degrees relative to what we see here). The versions shown here were included in Rines et al. (1976).   Members of the team at AAS included photography expert Charles Wyckoff (of Applied Photo Sciences) and sonar designer Martin Klein (of Klein Associates), in addition to Rines and Edgerton. Wyckoff – as photography expert – would have been responsible for part of the initial handling of the photographic prints. A big part of the flipper story is that the images were subjected to some sort of digital enhancement at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. This was always described in fairly vague terms and certainly has that Big Science allure about it. We’ll come back to it, too, in a minute.  Credit: Tetzoo.com

A well-resourced but not so serious group of 20 Japanese individuals led by a charismatic Chinese man went home with nothing to show for their happy adventures.

 The anti-hero of They Created a Monster is surely Frank Searle, a Cockney ex-soldier who, with his various girlfriends, camped his caravan on the other side of the Loch from the L-N Investigation Bureau.  With some doctored photos of Nessy that he would sell, he had a habit of trouble making, finally “doing a bunk” after attempting to sabotage some other searchers. 

Frank Searle. 5

Caption: Frank Searle (1921-2005) was quite the character, and his Loch Ness Monster photos were…. well, they were something else.

What is remarkable is the multi-decade persistence of these people always trying to get a better sighting, photo, or better yet, a film, of the famous creature.  As Cath Clark of the Guardian exclaimed in her review of this film “By the late 70s, there were more monster enthusiasts than midges by the loch.” 

Hence the poster illustrating such Loch Ness - Mad Ness. (Credit Screen Scotland)

As fun as this film was – its tongue firmly in its cheek - a more complete and up to date documentary needs to be made of the entire phenomenon that has enriched Scottish lore, not to mention the coffers of the Scottish tourist trade. (Nessy merch sales bag roughly £41 million in a typical year.) 

Loch Ness is over 26 miles long and 750 feet down at its deepest.  A whopper of a lake and a whopper of a tale.

More information

Premiere/release: The film was released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday 10 November 2023.

A special preview of the film was shown as part of a Scottish showcase at Cannes Docs on May 19, 2023.

The film premiered at Sitges Film Festival (Spain) 2023.

Streaming

You can watch the film on BBC iPlayer.

If you don’t have 90 minutes you can get a flavour of this film through the trailer.  Or for more segments of the movie please see BBC Scotland’s Playlist. Loch Ness:  They Created a Monster.

 Further Resources – A Deeper Dive into Loch Ness

 You can get a summary of all the Nessy sightings and their debunkings on Nessy’s Wikipedia page which also lists previous documentaries made.   You may want to see the classic 1995 documentary The Secrets of Loch Ness on YouTube.   Or if you aspire to be a real Nessy scholar, consult her Wiki page bibliography!