The 2015 film Backcountry portrays a black bear as a predatory man-eater, drawing comparisons to Jaws. Black bears are generally less aggressive than grizzlies or polar bears, but the film is based on a real attack in northern Ontario. Whether a black bear makes a convincing movie monster is a question the film leaves open for debate.
Some critics are saying that Backcountry, a new film released two weeks ago, “does for the woods what Jaws did for the ocean.”
Our guess is that those critics have never been in the woods.
Filmed in northern Ontario and marketed as a “wilderness survival thriller,” the limited-release movie is reportedly based on the true story of a couple that was savagely attacked by what the director called a “predatory” black bear about ten years ago. The story follows two unprepared and under skilled people that become disorientated in the woods and the target of a man-eating bruin, not unlike Bart the Bear’s craving for human flesh in The Edge (1997).
“There’s never been a black bear attack movie, ever. Ever,” director Adam MacDonald said in a story from idigitaltimes.com. “So I wanted to be the first and do it in a way that makes you feel like its really happening. It’s not a marauding bear. It’s not a bear that can flip a car over. It’s just the real deal.”
So far, the idea of a black bear as a killer, even though the animals aren’t considered as aggressive as brown or polar bears, doesn’t bother viewers and the film has received surprisingly positive reviews.
But what do you think — can a black bear make as good of a movie monster as a grizzly or great white?
Hollywood has always been more comfortable with monster bears than with accurate ones. Backcountry is the latest entry in a long tradition of films that trade on wilderness anxiety, and it will do what Jaws did: keep some people out of places they probably should have been better prepared to enter anyway. For experienced hunters and backcountry travelers, the real story is not the bear. It is the two unprepared people who got lost. That is the detail the film apparently gets right, even if the bear gets all the screen time.
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