Cults, Kooks, and Conspiracy! You get it all in Elijah Sullivan’s rabbit hole documentary The Hole Story, which recently celebrated its World Premiere at the 2025 Slamdance Film Festival. Pulling at the ever-increasing threads of a local mystery, The Hole Story charts the evolution of a mysterious hole from a simple act of property destruction to a top-secret hunt for a mythical society. Cut like a true-crime documentary for those of us obsessed with the world’s most far-fetched barroom tales, The Hole Story is loaded with preposterous theories, kooky mountain folk, secret societies, and government cover-ups.
Picture this: One day, you’re walking through the woods in Nothern California’s idyllic forests, minding your own business. Suddenly, you spot something odd. It’s a giant, 60-foot hole big enough to bury a military tank! But what the hell is a massive hole like this doing out in the remote woodland? That’s a question that’s been driving a small town crazy for years. Featuring interviews with law enforcement, people who claim responsibility for the mysterious hole, and a treasure trove of public access television clips (pay dirt for small town lunacy), The Hole Story is a one-stop shop for esoteric weirdness, and filmmaker Elijah Sullivan’s attempt to solve this bizarre unsolved crime.
Like something straight out of the Art Bell archives, The Hole Story is just what you’ve been looking for…if you’re the kind of person who always says “Tell me more…” to the crazy guy at the bar. I once let a woman in a Wal-Mart parking lot tell me all about how the Chinese government was sucking the electricity her body naturally produced through her nipples while she slept at night, so you better believe I’m going to watch a documentary about a 60-foot hand-dug hole that a secret society of millionaires maybe funded to research their weird ass belief in the “Lemurian People” and their mystical forgotten powers *DEEP BREATH*. Not sure what/who Lemurians are? Don’t worry, you’ll know more than you ever needed to after watching this all-encompassing deep dive into the weird world of orgone, Lemurian quartz, and the gatekeepers at the top hiding the secrets of this magical realm from us.
The Hole Story is pretty unbiased in its approach. Sullivan speaks with everyone from conservation officers to cryptozoologists to local townspeople in an effort to get an accurate account of the motivation behind this massive undertaking, and the damage it inflicted. Clear cut answers are hard to find because every time you think he’s found the answer, there’s another revelation that tips the scale back into the unknown. Finding the truth in strange cases like these is like chasing the horizon. But where there is no definitive notion of truth (depending on who you believe), there is a large cast of characters ready to share generations of weird belief, and a complicated web of elaborate conspiracy. In other words: Exactly what you’re looking for in an eccentric documentary like The Hole Story. Dig in!
“A one-stop shop for esoteric weirdness, and bizarre unsolved crimes”
Elijah Sullivan’s The Hole Story recently celebrated its World Premiere at the 2025 Slamdance Film Festival. Click HERE to follow our continued coverage of the festival and let us know all about your town’s strangest unsolved mysteries over in The Official Nightmare on Film Street Discord!
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