If you're looking for a good scare, go see this summer's version of the "Blair Witch Project," the documentary titled "Grizzly Man."
It's not fiction dressed up to look like a documentary. It's a documentary that seems almost fictional -- the story of Timothy Treadwell, a protector of grizzlies who spent 13 seasons in Alaska's Katmai wilderness filming the creatures. He produces some amazing photography, but in the end, one of the bears kills and eats him, as well as his girlfriend.
Though the attack is captured on the audio portion of his videocam - the lens cap was found still on the camera - we are spared hearing the screams and snapping bones. But the horror is still almost unbearable, in part because his film so clearly shows the implacable ferocity and power of the bears. The narrator, Werner Herzog, early and often refers to the "murder" that is to come. He also interviews the coroner, who gives a graphic description of the bloody wreckage that is recovered from the killer bear's stomach.
What is really scary, however, is not so much the killing of Timothy Treadwell, who ignored the most basic elements of common sense around wild animals.
As one Alaskan who knew him bluntly puts it: "He got what he asked for."
What's truly scary is Treadwell himself, a young man with a troubled background involving alcoholism, drugs and a desperate need to find a place in the universe. "Grizzly Man" is the tale of his descent from charming eccentric into madness, including a terrifying clip in which he rants with paranoid intensity about the supposed evils of the outside world and the National Park Service for failing to do more on behalf of the animal kingdom.
Treadwell also films himself, with grizzlies in the background, shouting "I love you" to animals to whom he has given human names. He talks pridefully of the danger he is running, but it never really seems to occur to him that they won't love him back even if he masters the right grizzly-like behavior. At one moment he films a titanic fight between two male grizzlies battling for the rights to a female; at another he films himself reaching out to pat a grizzly on the nose.
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