NORTON – As a young man, Charlie McCracken spent countless hours filming his hometown of Appalachia and surrounding areas with an old movie camera an uncle gave him years ago.
The old windup 8mm Brownie movie camera was fascinating for the young filmmaker.
"I shot thousands of feet of film in and around Appalachia, and in the process, fell in love with the craft," McCracken said.
The Norton resident said he developed a rich appreciation for the language of film and the many ways the language can cause an emotional reaction in others.
"Eventually I moved on from just documenting my surroundings to storytelling," he said. "I did a lot of work in the early nineties funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy working on documentaries through the Folklife Program."
McCracken said the time he spent working on the projects created a strong love for documentary film.
McCracken turned his love of documentary film toward Point Pleasant, W.Va., and the legend of the Mothman, the name folks in that area gave a strange creature they reported seeing for a little more than a year in the 1960s.
Some claim the red-eyed creature told of disasters to come to the area. The Mothman legend was the subject of a Richard Gere film several years ago called "The Mothman Prophecies."
McCracken and co-producers Travis Shortt and Matthew Fleming traveled to West Virginia several times to document the Mothman’s impact on local citizens. It all started when he and Shortt stumbled upon the Mothman mystery in 1999 when he visited the Area 51 Research Center in Nevada.
"I picked up a book by Jerome Clark called ‘Unexplained,’" McCracken said. "It was about strange sightings and weird occurrences throughout history."
McCracken and Shortt devoured the book just to pass the time away while traveling. It was three years later, when their advertising and production company was doing some work in West Virginia, that the Mothman legend returned fresh in their minds.
They noticed Point Pleasant was not too far from Huntington, so they decided to explore the town and the Mothman legend. McCracken said they fell in love with the town and its people and started a three-year project to produce the film for their company, Black River Films.
The documentary, "Dark Wings: The Mothman Chronicle," takes a different tack than the Richard Gere film, he said.
McCracken said the film has a July 2007 release date. It is getting some buzz in West Virginia where a two-minute trailer has been released in some local theaters.
"While we’re covering the events that took place in 1966 and 1967, our primary focus is on the individuals involved and how their lives have been affected" he said. "The Mothman events began in 1966 and culminated with the collapse of the Silver Bridge in December 1967. The story we are telling is about a community gripped with fear about the repeated sightings of a seven-foot winged creature resembling a man with glowing red eyes."
The bridge disaster, which killed 46 people, added to the community’s grief, he said.
"There was a sighting of the Mothman on the bridge the afternoon of the disaster," McCracken said. "Whether or not you believe in the Mothman, the hysteria swirling around it and the Silver Bridge permanently scarred Point Pleasant. We are not reaching any conclusions about the validity of the sightings in the film. Our focus is on the people, not the events. It’s a story that hasn’t been told from that perspective."
