Directed by John MacLaverty

If you’ve ever traversed a fraction of the shores and winding roads around Loch Ness, there’s one thing that staggers any unfamiliar with the landscape – the scale, the depth, the enormity of Scotland’s most famous Loch. With a volume greater than all of England and Wales’ collective fresh-water lakes, her mysteries have captivated artists and poets for centuries. But her legacy, the tourist ensnaring grasp of this deep and chilly breadth of water, lies below the surface and in the realms of the fantastical: Nessie.

Across the world, the legend of the Loch Ness monster has captivated the imaginations of children but troublingly has stoked the adventurous and greedy eyes of hunters, scientists, cryptozoologists, WW2 veterans, and fame-hungry fanatics for decades. Loch Ness: They Created a Monster is less centred around another attempt at locating the beast and more insight into the spectacular history of those who have undertaken the task themselves. Specifically John MacLaverty’s documentary charts a course through the height of the hunt from the 1970s and 80s, a time when the monster-hunting frenzy for the Loch Ness Monster was at its most eccentric, egotistical, intense, and intriguing.

Staggering the film to catalogue the ‘major sightings’ of Nessie, MacLaverty utilises extensive stitches of archive footage – some never seen before by general audiences – to impart a sense of (stay-with-us) authenticity to the documentary. Tricky, given the cryptozoological nature. But lacing together contemporary footage (some rather strikingly caught) of the landscape, with the vignettes of various Japanese groups, lawyers, ex-militaries, and the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau all paired with well-accompanied music.

Building on the accounts of those like Tim Dinsdale, who spent decades living by the shores of the Loch come hell or high water, the documentary layers itself from the more fantastical to the scientific and investigative. But there’s a clever shade in Maclaverty’s framing – presenting the facts and anecdotes of those associated with the various hunts for the monster, enabling audiences to poke holes and recognise fault in technique or methodology in the various hunters, rather than contrasting a deliberate narrative. There’s room for a touch more storytelling, which does bookend the documentary, concerning the history of the area and those living within the myth of Loch Ness.

But there is a crescendo building, an engaging one; MacLaverty constructs the documentary to draw from all the, thus far, eccentric but chiefly harmless attempts and studies of the Loch and into a far more violent and seedy addiction. The tone of the archival footage shifts and the once comedic notions drawn make way for a troublesome emergence of violence: knife threats, Molotov cocktails, and even disappearances. It’s all edited together to drive home a clear point, one which the documentary achieves tightly if a touch superficially.

With the psychology of those scouring Scottish waters for a sliver of proof of Nessie’s existence and the exceptionally overwhelming and violent methods which some resort to, Maclaverty’s documentary demonstrates all too precisely something with which we already knew: man is the real monster. Refreshingly offhand, not in structure or filmmaking, Loch Ness: They Created a Monster speaks in a similar vein to the locals who prosper from the stuffed Nessie and themed knick-knacks; they’re not too fussed whether the creature exists or not – so long as the mystery is maintained. MacLaverty’s documentary, similarly, doesn’t attempt to prove the existence of the monster but revels in the fascination and obsession of it all.