Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal Producers Open Up About Their Unconventional Documentary

Joshua Rofé and Mark Duplass reveal the inspiration for the Hulu series.

By Patrick Cavanaugh

Back in 2021, filmmakers Joshua Rofé and Mark Duplass collaborated on the three-part Hulu series Sasquatch, which may have started like any other supernatural investigation series, only to pivot into something far more real and something far more fascinating. The pair are continuing that trend with the all-new series Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal, another project that might sound like any other series of spooky stories, yet actually shines a light on all-too-human occurrences. In that sense, Out There serves almost as a spiritual sequel to Sasquatch, while opening the door to even more strange encounters. Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal is now streaming on Hulu.

"I remember Mark and I and the rest of our team on Sasquatch, we had had conversations about the fact that we keep coming across these stories that are similar to Sasquatch in one way or another, and wouldn't it be great if we could tell more of them? They're really fascinating and they touch on all these different facets of humanity and our own struggles, injustices, what have you," Rofé shared with ComicBook about the project's origins. "We moved forward with the series at Hulu and we hired an amazing showrunner in Allie Orton and we hired these incredible directors for all these different episodes, this great team of researchers, and all of a sudden, you have a group that dives in and is trying to find out, does this story hold weight, in terms of just straight-up doc humanity? Then, does this story hold weight in terms of genre, paranormal, cryptid fun, if you will?"

As far as whether the plan was always to focus on the destination and then construct a premise for the journey, the filmmaker admitted, "Finding those stories was not easy, but we found a bunch and I don't think we reverse-engineer [a premise], we get on the train and see where it goes."

Hulu describes the series, "Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal takes you inside eight true crime cases with shocking encounters with the paranormal world -- through eyewitness accounts, expert interviews, and all-new investigations. In each case, amidst an agonizing search for answers, one rumor emerges from the pack: something inhuman is afoot. These in-depth investigations transport us to towns and cities across North America where we speak to individuals with eyewitness accounts and first-person details about the extraordinary, supernatural events that changed their lives forever. A six-year-old boy in the Smoky Mountains disappears forever after being snatched by a mysterious ape-like beast. A UFO crash in Long Island sparks an assassination attempt and illuminates a massive political conspiracy. An occult coven of Satanic witches is implicated in a decades-old New Jersey murder. Lonely ghosts in San Francisco's Chinatown threaten to steal the lives of the unmarried. In these stories and more, Out There tracks down fresh leads and uncovers new evidence amid a labyrinth of twists and turns. At the end of the road, the investigations unearth new truths – about the power of mythology, the allure of the paranormal, and the monsters among us."

"I would say, to add to that, finding inklings of potential stories was actually fairly easy, because there were tons of these," Duplass added of the project. "But like a big funnel, they started to whittle themselves down to the ones that check all the different boxes that we wanted. We really have to contribute a lot of that to Allie and our directors, because when you look at a story like Sasquatch, you look at that central element of, what's the crime in Sasquatch? We've got these people torn limb from limb outside of a Northern California weed farm, and all the money's left and all the weed is left; did Sasquatch do this or did someone do this to try to make it look like Sasquatch did it to control them? And that's not our job to answer that question, our job is to explore that in the most fascinating way possible."

Related:

All episodes of Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal are now streaming on Hulu.

Will you be checking out the series? Contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter or on Instagram to talk all things Star Wars and horror! 

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