Seth Breedlove and his Small Town Monsters productions are shifting their focus to the sky with “Momo: The Missouri Monster,” and the upcoming “On The Trail Of” installment that will feature UFOs. The documentation of the unexplained artistically, and geographically are moving to new heights first with “Momo: The Missouri Monster.”
“Momo: The Missouri Monster,” which comes out Sept.20, really elevates Small Town Monsters in production quality and storytelling. "Momo" has this midnight movie/cinematic approach to it, as it blends eye-witness testimony with a mini-movie. These techniques aren’t foreign in Breedlove’s films, but this time around viewers are treated with a full semi-fictionalized production to go along with the documentary parts.
“ I’ve been wanting to make a MOMO movie going all the way back to our first film ‘ Minerva Monster’,”said Breedlove. ”The delay was that we weren’t having any luck turning up original witnesses. Finally, we were in a situation where we were either going to find a unique way to tell this story, or it wasn’t going to happen. I’d played around with the device of showing a ‘heightened’ version of real events and then contradicting it with the documentary (we did this in ‘Flatwoods Monster’), but creating a fake narrative film and using it to set the record straight about what actually happened in 1973 was really exciting for all of us.”
Another common theme in Breedlove’s films is nostalgia. The opening of “Momo” will pull at your past pop-culture memories, but also incite wonder.
“There’s very little planning with a Small Town Monsters movie, but the opening scene has always played a huge role in the earliest parts of filming and editing,” Breedlove said. “ We don’t even really write a treatment typically, but in this case the whole movie was scripted - except for the documentary moments. The goal is to create something right out of the gate that helps differentiate our stuff from the endless deluge of other para-content while also immediately grabbing viewers.”
There is a heavy UFO element in “Momo,” as sightings in the sky were prevalent around the sightings of the monster. This isn’t new to Breedlove’s previous research or some cryptid cases in general.
“It’s just the nature of the unexplained in general,” Breedlove said. “ It’s funny, I was just speaking at a MUFON conference and I mentioned that I don’t draw a dividing line between Cryptid or ghosts or UFOs. I’m fascinated by all of it, and there are so many common factors running between all these different phenomena that I just say I’m a fan of the unexplained”.
While Small Town Monsters had dabbled in UFO-related content before (“Flatwoods Monster”), and in “Momo”, UFOs will finally get a full Small Town Monsters film. The next search in the “On The Trail Off “ series will be “On the Trail Of UFOs,” and is currently in production.
“It’s a full-scale response to the current state of the field, where it stands in pop culture and how it’s viewed by most people today,” Breedlove said. “ It’s also a big look at the phenomenon similar to the last three episodes of ‘On the Trail of Bigfoot.’ There’s still the historical component but it’s much spread out throughout the series and the history isn’t doled out chronologically. We’ll be covering many different well-known events but it’s also very focused on a lot of unknown events, as well. Our goal is to have as many UFO witnesses in this one as we do ‘experts’.”
-By MIKE DAMANTE