Frogman retrospective screening at FrightFest, 30th August 2026
In August 1999, on a car trip with his bickering parents (Justen Jones, Emily Joe Hayes) and older sister Lizzie (Shea Mikel) to Loveland, Ohio, ten-year-old Dallas (Indiana Arnold) captures something walking bipedally in the woods on his Hi-8 camera – a creature with human height and posture, but with batrachian form. This is the Loveland Frogman, a phenomenon not real in the same way that, say, existing animals like an alligator or a koala are real, or indeed in the way that established and recognised fictive characters like Frankenstein or his monster, or indeed Kermit the Frog, are real (as icons of popular culture), but certainly real in the sense that it is an attested cryptid, not merely invented from thin air for the purposes of Anthony Cousins’ Frogman, even if its very existence remains in question. The Loveland Frogman is real enough to have been adopted and embraced by the people of Loveland, where it has become a mascot (at least since Cousins’ film came out, and in part under the film’s own influence). Yet unlike other cryptids like the Sasquatch, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the chupacabra or Mothman, there is something absurd – something inherently unbelieveable – about this lumbering outsized frog with its magic wand.
So no wonder, at 32, Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) is still seeing his footage of the Frogman ridiculed and declared fake by influential vloggers like Jeremy J (Chris Canfield). It does not help Dallas’ credibility that he went on to direct amateur short films with his best friends Scotty (Benny Barrett) and Amy (Chelsey Grant) which were precisely homemade monster movies with cheap makeup and effects, so that sceptics assume the same of his childhood footage. Even that later fictive work has dried up, and now, at age 32, he is unemployed and living in the spare room of his sister’s place, while cameraman Scotty shoots wedding events and makes ends meet as a barista, and Amy, unable to get acting work locally beyond the odd ad spot, is about to test her fortune in Hollywood. So when Dallas proposes heading to Loveland for the weekend to make a documentary that will capture “irrefutable proof that Frogman exists” and to shoot it on his boyhood Hi-8 camera (“it’s symbolic,” says Dallas of the outmoded, lo-res equipment), this is the last chance for these friends maybe to resolve their feelings for each other before it is too late and to relive together the dreams of their youth before all three slip fully into the disappointments of adulthood.
Is Frogman real? What they find in Loveland is a community happy to cash in on the cryptid whose legend Dallas helped create. The hotel where they stay is called the Bullfrog Bed and Breakfast, and its owner Gretel (Chari Eckmann) hands them a commercialised pamphlet for Frogman Point where sightings are said to be most frequent. The Sticky Tongue Gift Shop sells tacky Frogman merch. And it seems there is a local cottage industry (and possibly also a cult) dedicated to keeping the myth alive. Yet as Dallas visits old George Hale (Jack Neveaux) who had taken the first documented photo of Frogman, and as the pillars of Loveland’s community seem to close ranks, it appears more and more that there is something sinister and supernatural going on beneath the surface of this town – unless of course this whole thing is just another of Dallas’ fictive creature features.
In keeping with its fixation on questions of veridicality, Frogman is shot as found footage, the faux-reportage format most strongly associated with both authenticity and inauthenticity, with immersive immediacy and fabricated fictionality. Not only are there several false starts and fakeouts peppered through the film to undermine Dallas’ quest for real proof of Frogman’s existence, but we are also always aware that Dallas’ film is also Cousins’, with the director and his co-writer John Karsko at pains to show how readily these true-seeming materials are counterfeited and falsified. For what Dallas and his friends are supposedly living on camera, Cousins lovingly constructs, complete with a monster that is a classic Godzilla-style man in a costume, and old-school make-up effects – and while the film begins in a near realist mode, by the end it goes truly gonzo with its small-town conspiracy and cryptid chaos, almost defying viewers to continue believing what they are seeing.
Cousins and Karsko draw from the best. For Frogman takes from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) its tell-then-show structure (where everything said in early vox pops about Loveland’s monstrous mascot will become important in the frantic final act), from Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek (2013) its shift from the creature’s kitschy icons on sale in the town to its weirder reality in the wilds (where ‘Frogman fucks’), and from Elliot Goldner’s The Borderlands (2013) its panicky climax in underground tunnels. There are even the eggs and hybridised life cycles from Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Yet most of all, while the film is often creepy, it never forgets to be funny, as these endearing characters slowly drift away from each other and metamorphose into bitter, alienating adulthood. The closing credits (which have multiple codas) promise that “Frogman will return” – and indeed he now has, even bigger, better and more bonkers.
strap: In Anthony Cousins’ found-footage horror comedy, a kidult returns to a childhood haunt to prove the existence of a raniform cryptid
© Anton Bitel
