The Legend of Boggy Creek

Charles B. Pierce was an Arkansas ad man who borrowed the money, pointed a camera at his own swamp, and walked away with one of the most profitable independent films of the decade. It presents the Fouke Monster, a local Bigfoot, as straight documentary, with the actual residents of Fouke playing themselves and recounting their encounters between long, eerie shots of the bottomland. It plays closer to a nature film with a folk ballad over it than to a monster movie, and the restraint is why it still gets under people's skin.

It grossed a fortune, invented the regional-creature docudrama, and every backwoods-legend film since owes it money.