History Channel producers tap Bucknell expertise

Professor Douglas Candland, left, is interviewed by a film crew preparing a two-hour program for the History Channel.

Posted June 25, 2008

Updated July 1, 2008

LEWISBURG, Pa. – An international production crew visited the Bucknell University campus Wednesday to interview a professor and student researcher about primate behavior for an upcoming two-hour History Channel program.

The program is called "Bad Moon Rising: The Real Wolf Man." An air date has not been set.

The production team, Story House Productions, based in Washington, D.C., interviewed Douglas Candland, professor emeritus of psychology and animal behavior, to help describe relationships between primates and feral children. 

International expert
Candland is regarded as an international expert on feral children and has written extensively on the topic and been part of documentary films produced by the BBC and National Geographic. National Geographic’s "Feral Children," filmed in Uganda, aired in 2007 and the BBC’s "The Boy Who Was Raised with Monkeys" was broadcast in 1999.

“Historically and scientifically, we’re looking at the folklore of the werewolf, and not just the Hollywood version,” said Claire Callahan, a producer for Story House Productions. “There exists some type of man-beast in many cultures since the beginning of time.”

The four-person production team used the animal behavior lab as the backdrop for the first part of the interviews and included an extensive filming session with Meghan Hoopes, a junior from Rockville, Md., who is conducting computer-assisted object recognition and abstract counting research by primates this summer.

Additional footage
Additional interview footage was shot in another campus location against a 20-foot  “green screen” on which the production team would later project imagery.

Callahan said the production will take the film crew across the United States and to Germany and France.

“France is a big part of the film,” she said. “We are re-investigating a series of mysterious man-beast attacks in 18th century France that killed 100 people over a two-and-a-half-year period.”

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