Seth Breedlove's Search for the Unexplained

Seth Breedlove’s Small Town Monsters production company has been scaring up a frightening amount of activity since 2014. After the release of “The Mothman of Point Pleasant,” his Ohio-based company, which produces documentaries about myths and monsters across the country, has grown to a staff of seven people.

Small Town Monsters releases about four new feature-length documentaries a year, such as 2022’s “American Werewolves,” which documents sightings of the beasts across the American heartland. Breedlove is also excited about his company’s new book publishing efforts and its June 2023 Monster Fest, a Comic-Con-style event in Canton. 

To get into the Halloween spirit, we caught up with Breedlove to talk monsters, myths and what creepy creatures he is chasing now. 

What role does lore play in our lives?  
It’s extremely important to American culture, but when you narrow it down to the culture of a region and a community, it speaks directly to that place. That’s really what we’ve been exploring with our “Legends” series of movies is the folkloric side of things — what those stories can tell us about a region. Last year, we made a movie about werewolf legends from Louisiana. You can track how those legends originated by looking at who settled that area. There are all these legends about werewolves coming out of French Canada, and a lot of Louisiana was settled by French Canadians.

What have you learned about how communities do or don’t embrace myths and monsters?
It’s a shame that a lot of this stuff is just laughed off or ignored completely by small towns because they feel like it makes them a laughingstock or something. But I don’t think they understand the importance of those stories to the overall history of the area. We saw that even out in Minerva [when we were making “Minerva Monster”]. People are embarrassed by stories about the monster, but you know, it’s a part of their local history that goes all the way back to the late 1800s.

What monsters are you chasing now?
Everyone was asking us for years about the Jersey Devil, and we’re about to release a Jersey Devil movie, but there’s also the Dover Demon in Dover, Massachusetts. We’re hoping to make a movie in the next couple years about the Kelly-Hopkinsville Goblins out of Kentucky. There are a lot of Bigfoot cases we haven’t covered. There’s also stuff out in Utah and Arizona and New Mexico that we haven’t covered yet — a lot of them originate with Native Americans. There are stories there that should be explored.

For more information, visit smalltownmonsters.com.