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How Harry and the Hendersons Taught Us to Meet the Mysterious with Compassion
The Hendersons were brave enough to imagine bigfoot not as a monster, but as a person.
The 1987 film Harry and the Hendersons (streaming now on Peacock) is a family comedy starring John Lithgow as George Henderson, a man whose family develops an unusual bond with a cryptozoological creature. The Hendersons have just wrapped up a weekend in the great outdoors and they’re on their way home in a wood-paneled station wagon. The weather is nice and the landscape picturesque, the sunlight intermittently blinding as it flickers through the trees.
They pass a curious fox here and a bear cub there, before George accidentally hits nature head on. As George navigates the winding forest road, under the influence of overconfidence, poor visibility, and good old fashioned distracted driving, he slams right into the missing link himself.
At first, they think it’s a bear, or maybe a gorilla (not likely in the United States’ Pacific Northwest), which would have been less surprising than what they actually found. When George finally approached the lifeless pile of fur in the road, he discovered a sasquatch, a bigfoot, a wildman… and they named him Harry.
Harry and the Hendersons dared to ask, “What if Bigfoot was a person?”
The discovery of Harry and their sudden possession of his supposed corpse (Harry is very much alive, he just needs a minute) is at first equal parts opportunity and inconvenience. The car is banged up and Harry smells to high heaven. They strap his body to the roof and take him back home not out of any guilt or even curiosity, but because George thinks they might be able to make some money. He thinks only of Harry’s value, and what he might be able to gain from his role in the discovery. When George says that Harry is their ticket to a better life, his wife Nancy rightly asks, “a better life for whom? What about his life?”
Understandably scared and confused, Harry meets the Hendersons with apparent aggression when he later wakes up inside their suburban home. After doing considerable damage to the house, George stares at Harry down the barrel of his rifle, but he can’t pull the trigger. At the last moment, he sees something special in Harry’s eyes.
Over the course of the movie, the Hendersons go through a collective transformation. It begins with wanting Harry dead, then wanting Harry alive as a sideshow act. Later, they want Harry to live with them as a member of the family, but in that moment they realize he can’t stay. Their love for Harry having come into full bloom, they realize that their desires have to take a backseat to what’s best for Harry. Moreover, they realize that decisions about Harry’s life should be made by him.
“We are talking about a living, breathing being. It might even be some kind of a person.” - Melinda Dillon as Nancy Henderson
King Kong in its various incarnations, tells a similar story about the overexploitation of the natural world. In Peter Jackson’s 2005 adaptation, filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) encounters a truly great ape on the mysterious Skull Island. In awe of the natural world, Denham does what people sometimes do, and cooks up a way to put a box around the discovery and charge a fee to look at it. Kong’s fate is tragic, but Harry’s is happier, and that was revolutionary in and of itself.
The earliest appearances of bigfoot on film (fictional film, that is, not to be confused with footage of any alleged actual cryptids) are almost exclusively documentaries or horror films. Sasquatch’s earliest movie credits include the 1972 horror The Legend of Boggy Creek, Shriek of the Mutilated (1974), and Creature from Black Lake (1976). Almost without exception, anytime bigfoot showed up in a fictional story, it was as a villain.
Harry and the Hendersons is, in many ways, like any other family film. It has a not-so-subtle moral lesson with humor and adventure wrapped around it. But it was the first time someone dared to imagine bigfoot as more than a monster on screen. It gave us a vision of Pacific Northwest forests not as dark and dangerous places roamed by a killer ape man, but as a sort of Eden standing at the fringes of civilization, still unspoiled. There, the gentle sasquatches live their peaceful lives and they’ll continue to do so, if only we’ll let them. Because when we exploit nature to its detriment, we diminish not just the natural world but ourselves as well.
Catch Harry and the Hendersons streaming now on Peacock!
