By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
It’s been 60 years since the first sightings of a strange, winged cryptid shook Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and nearly 25 years since Richard Hatem’s screenplay for The Mothman Prophecies took the famed cryptid out of the realm of local history and fringe paranormal researchers and into the Hollywood mainstream. At the time, Hatem wasn’t sure what impact, if any, the film would have. What he did know was that he had a love for the source material – John Keel’s 1975 classic of the same name – and that he couldn’t write a straightforward adaptation of that book. It was, he noted, too big, too weird, and too sprawling. What he sought to do instead was to capture the feel of Keel’s book, the sense of confusion and anxiety and paranoia that radiated out from Point Pleasant to infect the author’s life.
And though it isn’t a straightforward adaptation of the source material, for many folks Hatem’s screenplay was their introduction to the cryptid and the concepts that have come to define him. For instance, Keel’s book links the appearance of the Mothman to the collapse of the Silver Bridge, citing vague predictions of a tragedy from mysterious individuals who gave the writer and reporter just enough information to make him worry, but not enough to clearly predict or prevent what was to come. It made the Mothman sightings appear, at least in Keel’s writing, as though the entity were a predictor or harbinger of doom. Hatem drove this point home by having the character of Alexander Leek (an academic and stand in for Keel the investigator) explain to Richard Gere’s character of John Klein (a representation of Keel the experiencer) that the image often appears before tragedies, including an appearance at Chernobyl before the nuclear reactor meltdown there in 1986.
This fits the timeline of the film, which is set in 2002, 16 years after the Chernobyl disaster instead of twenty years prior. But it was a complete fabrication. There were no actual sightings of a winged being at the doomed reactor.
“When I wrote it, I was making it up,” Hatem said.
The screenplay was written in 1997, he noted, before the ubiquity of the internet.
“It (the internet) was not part of my life, so I was not checking news feeds. I had certainly never read any books outside of the Mothman Prophecies that had anything to do with Mothman. Certainly nothing current. So, it served my purposes to extend the mythology down the line a little bit, but I was making it up.”
But, despite being fiction, Hatem’s attempt to “extend the mythology” has worked, with legions of online “researchers” today citing it as a legitimate example of the Mothman being seen prior to a tragedy.
Another unintended consequence of Hatem’s film might be the Mothman Festival itself, where the screenwriter and podcaster will host a pair of talks this weekend. The festival, organized by Mothman Museum curator Jeff Wamsley, debuted in 2002 – the same year the film was released – building on the attention the film had garnered as a way to promote tourism to the small Ohio River town. Since then, the festival has grown into one of the premier paranormal and legend tripping destinations of the eastern United States, drawing interest and visitors from across the country and around the world.
Hatem will host a presentation about the film at 3 p.m. on Saturday, September 19, as part of the festival’s official events. Then, later that evening, he will hold a live reading of his popular podcast, Richard Hatem’s Paranormal Bookshelf from 7 – 9 p.m. Tickets for that event, where Hatem will explore West Virginia writer Gray Barker’s book “They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers,” are available through Hatem’s website at the events link.
For those who saw Hatem’s Light in the Dark tour at last year’s event, this will not be a repeat of that performance, but something that the writer hasn’t performed live before. Though that book is not directly related to Mothman, it is adjacent (Barker’s book on the events, The Silver Bridge, debuted in 1970, five years before Keel’s Mothman Prophecies) and Hatem references meeting John Keel and the early work on the screenplay for the film.
“I chose that one for the Mothman Festival because it not only is talking about Gray Barker, which I thought was interesting and peripherally connected, but the story that I tell about myself is about the very beginning of the writing process for the script for the Mothman Prophecies and some of my communications with John Keel, so it seemed very sort of on theme.”
Those who haven’t yet seen the “live only” episode that Hatem featured at last year’s event, can find tickets to the Cleveland (September 16) and Pittsburgh (September 17) readings of that show at Hatem’s event page as well.
For more information about the Mothman Festival, including a listing of speakers, entertainment, and events, visit their website at mothmanfestival.com.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
