The Gable film
Posted by stevemosby on August 24th, 2009
I thought I’d post this – just for shits and giggles, as they say. Long-time readers of this blog will know that, despite being a hard-line skeptic, I’m interested in supernatural stuff, and hang around various forums reading, and usually laughing, at various reports. UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot, monsters. I don’t actively believe in any of it. But still. The whole subject fascinates me. And so I figured I might as well – occasionally – post stuff along those lines that I find interesting. And the Gable film is one of them.
It has a habit of disappearing from Youtbe, but you can currently watch the full version here.
Now, this has been online for about two years. The story behind it is an elaborate one, linked (at least slightly) to the ‘legend’ of the Michigan Dogman. The video was allegedly – a la Blair Witch – found in a garage sale. It’s fairly easy to pick the story out of the video, at least after the initial dicking around, and to note that the last few frames, where the mouth appears on camera, are a little too opportune, and therefore most likely fake. Not necessarily, but most likely.
However.
The video of the alleged ‘creature’ is quite compelling. (One of the few videos you’ll find, in fact, where it is). Theories persist as to whether it might be a bear, dog, big cat, gorilla or whatever, and it’s hard to say because it’s blurry and brief. But it ‘attacks’ without warning, and, from the way it moves, it doesn’t look much like a man in a costume or CGI. If it’s faked – say for a movie viral – it’s pretty damn good. My guess, if it is faked, would be a fucking big dog with a bear hide strapped to it.
Anyway, that’s been around for a bit. Then, a couple of months back, following TV coverage, someone posted this on Youtube:
I was at my little brother’s house Friday June 10th and my sister-in-law was watching Fox News. (She’s madly in lust with that Sean Hannity guy). A short segment came on about “the Beast of Bray Road”. Hannity then played a clip from a film named…”The Gable Film”.
Sirens went off in my head.
Our only uncle was a film nut in college, back in the seventies. He was always making home movies and beer commercials. He was even hired, (not for pay), to help the Michigan Department of Natural Resources investigate and document a bear attack, just north of Bellaire. (Our Grandmother worked in the Antrim County Courthouse,…. she had a hand in getting him the gig). The victim’s name was Aaron GABLE.
…..GABLE!!!
My mother tells us that after filming the attack scene, our Uncle John was so distraught that he packed up his stuff and moved to Florida, two weeks later!. Mom says his behavior was becoming very psychotic, he couldn’t sleep at night and he kept going on about how “bears have FIVE toes,….. dogs have four”!. Just a week after he left, a DNR officer hand-delivered the film that Uncle John made to my Mother’s house. It’s been in a box in the basement ever since.
Now, I seem to recall that these films usually lasted about five minutes or so, but the film we have is only about a minute long… and the end of it was obviously torn off, not cut clean. I wonder just how much is missing? We almost threw this film away just a couple of years ago, but I wound up buying a vintage projector on eBay, just to see what was on this film. (Boy, was I suprised). NOW,….. I find that there’s this “Gable” film out there?
I wonder if these two films are related. I’ll see if I can get it in better resolution, other than with Wifey’s camera-phone. (It might be expensive,….. but I’m sure it’ll be worth it).
One thing’s for certain, whatever it was on that clip that they played on Fox News,….. it sure didn’t look like no Bear.
Along with this clip, which – regardless of truth – is possibly a tad disturbing/distressing, so I’m not posting a preview image. It’s a body-find, matching one of the figures from the first video. Upper torso. No lower torso. No defensive wounds or blood-soaked ground, but – for those who have seen such images in the past – reasonably convincing. The car is supposed to be registered to an Aaron Gable, which means the victim in the film might be the woman from film one, rather than Aaron Gable himself.
It’s a curious case. And you can google it for more details. There’s nothing really supernatural about it, but the final seconds of the first film are intriguing. What the fuck is that? I hope it’s a neat upcoming film, rather than what it all appears to be.
August 24th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
From the “investigative websites” set up to support it/claim it’s a hoax (like this – http://www.wildlegends.webs.com/), it has all the hallmarks of an ARG of some sort for some upcoming thing. If I was to go out on a limb, I’d say maybe more likely to be a game than a film.
The thing in the video actually looked more like a bear to me – like this.
Fascinating – I does love me a good virally ARG-ey type thing – but fake as a pair of porno boobies.
August 24th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
That’s interesting – can’t access that site, for some reason, but I’ve seen various arguments on either side. The bear video is good, though: I’ve seen a few commentaries saying bears native to the region usually go up on two legs as a warning, and don’t zig-zag, so it’s nice to see an alternative where they kind of do.
Fake, though. The whole thing? I’m certainly not ruling it out – it’s probably the best explanation, all in all. But, if it’s marketing, it’s been going on for over two years now. And the original video – faked, or an accidental real incident purloined?
August 25th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Well, if it was a real one, it’s not using the original name. “Aaron Gable” exists only in this film, and there’s apparently (and more convincingly) no matching record of such a bear/animal attack where and when this is purported to have occurred. And, to be fair, I don’t even think it holds up as realistic behaviour from the cameraman, nor in terms of the cutting of the film. “This here’s the general reel we use for shooting ourselves snowmobiling in winter, and wandering around in spring, in ten-second scenes, because we only have 90 seconds worth of cinefilm and we can’t afford to waste it. Now we’ll use it to film a big thing out the window of the truck which we don’t stop driving to watch, and here I am standing very close to the big thing and not doing too much until I’ve got a good shot of it charging me.”
The second part is, well, jank. Animals don’t cut people relatively neatly in two; to do that either they bite or pull, leaving a far bigger mess (dragged organs, spine, or at least an empty chest cavity). And there’d certainly not be an almost pristine blood-free shirt left behind. They also, generally, go for the throat. That doesn’t look like real crime scene work either – since the year dot police have used numeric or letter markers, not bits of paper with “giant footprint” scrawled on them (likewise, they use case numbers, not unreferenced “victim’s name Aaron Gable” notes), and they don’t cover bodies in tarp to be revealed as the camera arrives.
There’s a decent bunch of criticisms on the slow-mo version here. Including the use of “static” on the bite shot, which you wouldn’t get from a non-electronic cinecamera.
I still say it’s an ARG – or possibly a random college hobby like lonelygirl15. Two years is a long time for the former, though ‘Why So Serious?’ ran for 15 months before the movie released, but it could easily be for a game project that ended up being delayed, Alan Wake-style.
August 25th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I’d never heard of this. No expert, but the shoulders and movement make it look like a gorilla to me. However, given that the thing charges with no apparent warning, more likely to be an actor in an anamatronic gorilla suit, a low-budget Andy Serkis.
I’d also have to agree with JR on the second one. It looks realistic enough, but with the exception of attack by a large shark, I can’t imagine an animal causing those massive but specific injuries (and I’m assuming you don’t get sharks in Michigan…).
Still very nicely done, and I like this modern tradition of ghost and monster stories.
August 25th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Well, I like it too, Kevin, which is the main thing that intrigues me about it all. I don’t mind a hoax – I love a good hoax, in fact. It takes me back to the ‘Boggy Creek’ style films I remember tainting my youth.
Anyhow. Well, I agree about the second film. When I said it looked reasonably convincing, I meant it looked like a corpse. It looks like corpses I’ve seen in videos, but generally those that are the result of a motorcycle or car accident. It looks nothing like what you’d expect from a wild animal attack (bits and pieces, basically). On those grounds, it must surely be bogus. (No sign of a second victim, either).
Just to play devil’s advocate for the second film, though. Assuming it’s modern, money has been spent on it (the vehicles, people, etc), and so it’s weird that more care wasn’t taken to make the scene convincing. The label the cop holds up says the vehicle reg is for Aaron Gable, not that it’s the name of the victim (in the first film, there’s debate over whether it’s a man or a woman chopping wood; my guess is woman). And, assuming it’s a fake, there are some nice details. There are glasses found, for example, whereas nobody in the first film seems to wear glasses. That’s a weird, random touch. So, with that care, I don’t get why the scene wouldn’t have been done from a distance: so you could make out the shirt, say, but with FX … spread around a bit. For want of a better way of putting it.
My point is just that, if you had the resources to do this fake video, you could easily do something a bit better. And probably would. But yes, I think it’s massively suspect.
The first video, though… Hmmm. The ‘mouth’ frames are dodgy as anything. Someone on Youtube thinks it’s separate shots of a dog barking through a wire fence, and I’m inclined to agree. But the animal charging? I think that’s great stuff, even if it’s a fake. There are frames where it looks like a dog, a bear or a gorilla; and then frames where you think it can’t be any of those things. And if it’s a guy in a costume, then he’s a talented guy.
But yeah – I don’t believe this stuff. Just, occasionally, there are clips that are more intriguing than others.
August 25th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I guess the skill with these things (if it is indeed a fake), is to leave what’s seen as ambiguous as possible. First time I watched the embedded clip I thought – ‘that’s a bloke running about underneath a blanket’. Second time round, I thought maybe bear, but that, yes, it does move more like a gorilla.
Reminds me of something Steven Spielberg said for a Q&A in the Anniversary issue of Empire – did he still believe in extra terrestrials? His reply was that he was less sure now, because the proliferation of high quality video cameras and camera-phones hadn’t led to more UFO sightings or provided any clearer evidence of what sightings there had been.
Odd that conjuring up mystery can be a lot easier with an 8mm cine-camera, a piece of string and a hubcap than it is with a hi-def video camera and an off the shelf special effects package.
August 25th, 2009 at 9:16 pm
One thing about the proliferation of camera-phones is that it creates an arms-race in terms of ideas. So now the idea that aliens can interfere with equipment is prevalent in the community. They don’t work from the evidence; they work from their pre-existing beliefs, and then find explanations for the lack of evidence. Increasingly elaborate ones.
But I think you’re right that we implicitly trust the simpler effects. As an example, this –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHy84dKPcb4
- is a famously acknowledged fake. And, although almost photo-realistic, I think it’s obviously fake even without the acknowledgement. Whereas this –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty4WyPqigx8
- as far as I know is still alleged to be real. Now, I don’t believe for a second that it is. There are lots of very obvious problems with it. But I still find it far more compelling, and I think the main reason is that it relies on puppetry rather than CGI.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
actually I filmed it in Greenwich Park. Had you all going though
August 26th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I’ve been a gullible fool. I recognise the trees now…
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
I think we have to automatically be suspicious of anyone who actively watches Fox News and even moreso of anyone who finds Sean Hannity ‘hot’.
I mean, that’s the kind of disturbing behaviour that makes Still Bleeding’s remit sound cosy.