Gere with Alan Bates as the former academic who may have the key to the events

“You have two very logical, practical characters: a police officer, Laura’s character; and a journalist, played by Richard Gere,” adds Lakeshore’s Gary Lucchesi. “She watched Meet the Press [a TV show on which Gere’s character appears] and she recognises him. She’s not a country bumpkin.”

Even less of a stereotype is Gere’s reporter, whose approach to the aura of fear that pervades Point Pleasant could never be described as ‘crusading’. He is affected by the mothman phenomenon as much as they are, and is every bit as afraid of it as well.

“Richard’s a great choice,” says Pellington. “You’ve got to have a guy that you’re going to believe when people tell him that they saw these things or when he says, ‘I got a call from an entity named Indrid Cold,’ otherwise you’d have to laugh.”

Debra Messing as Klein’s doomed wife, Mary

For all its sense of place, The Mothman Prophecies wasn’t filmed in Point Pleasant because the new bridge - opened by President Johnson on February 8, 1968 - no longer connects with the centre of the town. In fact, it wasn’t even filmed in Virginia: the film-makers scoured the eastern states until they came up with Kittanning, not far from Pittsburgh. The surrounding countryside was very similar to West Virginia, and there was a bridge very like Point Pleasant’s Silver Bridge (not exactly the same, because that design - for obvious reasons - isn’t used any more). And the town itself could easily have been Point Pleasant.

“These towns just haven’t changed much in the last 100 years,” says Gere. “You see the old architecture - some of it not well kept up, but a minimum of new things - and it still has a downtown. The strip malls and the malls outside have not really taken over yet.”

TRUE BELIEVER Mothman director Mark Pellington

“It feels strangely out of place but never obviously or overtly weird or spooky,” adds Pellington. “It’s just simple and sad.” And that, he explains, was what the film really needed to anchor it in reality without smothering it in realism.

“Perception is a trick thing,” concludes the director. “Everybody has their own experiences and everybody has little mind tricks or things that say, ‘Was that real?’, from simple deja-vus to blackouts.

“My goal is to make it believable to the people sitting in the theatre and for them to feel something, even if they have no clue what is going on. As the puzzle builds, everybody wants to know why John is where he is and what’s going to happen. Those are the two questions that need to be answered. If they are answered and the audience leaves the theatre feeling something - and, I hope, feeling a range of emotions - then we’ve done OK.”