Funny you should mention it, I just watched it the other night. I hadn’t read the book, but I read Robert Anton Wilson’s take on the whole thing in Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati — he pretty well summarized Keel’s book. I also learned more details of the original, true, Mothman story from a cool web site “The Mystery of the Mothman…” which unfortunately no longer exists.
I remember when the Silver Bridge collapsed when I was a young kid in Ohio and it was all over the news. But I didn’t learn of the Mothman connection until I read Cosmic Trigger. Creepy as hell!
I thought the movie was overly fictionalized and romanticized, and had practically no Mothman at all! That was a big disappointment! Instead of being about Mothman and real people, it was entirely about Richard Gere and his personal hangups. (Yes, Richard, it’s always about you, isn’t it?)
Wasn’t there supposed to be another Mothman movie? How do we get to see it? No distribution, I guess.
I didn’t like the way the story was removed from the 1960s to the present, and so many details of the original facts were changed (like placing the bridge collapse on Christmas Eve, instead of December 15, just to make it slightly more romantic). Since the true story had been so drastically altered for this movie, I’m not sure what was even the point of making this movie at all.
Note how the occult researcher’s name was “Leek” — hey, that’s Keel spelled backwards! You can’t fool me, I caught that one right off!
