Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Stuart Ortiz
Starring: Peter Zizzo, Terri Apple, Andy Lauer, Matthew Peschio, Janna Cardia, Thomas Wolfe Jr, Tim Shelburne
It has been argued that the novel 'Dracula', with its cross-media montage of letters, journal entries and newspaper articles, is the first found footage horror (with Stoker's book itself echoing 'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus' dizzying Romantic perspectives from half a century earlier), an assertation which implies that the recovered material mode is one that is intrinsic to the genre; an artery running through the campfire tales which happened to a cousin of a friend just out of town, that crawl at the start of Texas Chain Saw Massacre (both displayed AND read aloud!), the imperial Ghost Watch (it's that time of year). Not all horror inculcates a veneer of verisimilitude, yet the sifting shadows of intertextuality, the blurring of diegesis, entails extra genre thrills: as if the terror within is one meta shift from reaching out of the screen towards us like Samara/Sadako.
A veteran of the found footage subgenre with the fun Grave Encounters duology (directed as part of the Vicious Brothers with Colin Minihan, the team who also did the underrated It Stains the Sands Red), Stuart Oritz's Strange Harvest opens within the recognisable frameworks of the true crime documentary: left handed piano riffs over zooming cityscapes, bromide voiceovers - "there's so many things we don't understand about this case," an intertitle informing us that we're about to watch a documentary about "the most underreported cases in Southern Californian history": the disparate pieces of which resemble an obscure picture chief investigator and lead interviewee Detective Joe Kirby is unsure he even wants to see. Further text advises viewer discretion regarding what we are about to witness, and they're not kidding: if I wasn't professionally bound, being of a sensitive nature I would have probably knocked Strange Harvest off after 20 minutes, such is the visceral and unsettling countenance of this pseudo-documentary horror triumph.
Theatrical psychopath "Mr Shiny" has enacted kills over a period of decades in Inland Empire (in haunting indexical shots, the film presents the metropolitan grid of the area as flatly sinister), with the murders taking on an artisan, ritualistic mien. An embodiment of real-life American boogeymen, with his home invasions, taunting letters and cryptology, Shiny is a bricolage of existent serial killers (a little of the Manson family, the Zodiac killer, et al), furthering his credibility as a threat. Via the unforgiving grain of cam or video footage, the film doesn't skimp on depicting the grim aftermath or, at points, enactment of his crimes. An early murder is a quadruple homicide, with a family of four (yes, kids and all) tied to the dining chairs with buckets below them to catch the blood as they bleed out. The bucket under the table imagery is a clear nod to Se7en, and that film's similarly imaginative, ideological killer (clearly a totem for Oritz), although Mr Shiny may turn out to be in tune with something a little more supernatural... In a similar accumulative dynamic to Fincher's film, Strange Harvest's bleak tone is set early, and the nightmare envelope continues to be pushed throughout.
Our touchstones across the decades are the aforementioned Det. Kirby (Peter Zizzo - omg what a rabbit hole of a Wikipedia entry), along with Terri Apple as Det. Lexi Taylor, who are both note perfect in their central roles as the detectives haunted and flummoxed by the killer over the years. The humanity of Zizzo and Apple, along with their storytelling skills, do as much to anchor the story in realism as the pristine genre window dressing does (side note: the replication of the mode reinforced to me how inflexibly constructed supposedly "true" crime docs are). It's a balancing act, the actors offsetting the imitation of typical talking heads ("can we take a break?") with lived in and relatable characterisation, similar to how the film uses genre conventions to configure vivid horror in a way that is ruthlessly plausible. The next murder is (spoiler, but also warning I suppose) a 12-year-old boy. We see press conferences with his grieving parents, the efforts to find the child, before his little body is, inevitably, found - in a river with his liver removed.
In vogue with 2025's new cruelty (even the boring Weapons, essentially a film for children, earns an 18 certificate for "strong bloody violence and gore"), and amongst some strong contenders, Strange Harvest was the one which almost broke me. I can't stomach True Crime. I don't like stuff that's real (I get enough of that in my own life, etc), whereas the guignol fantasies of horror are safely distanced in the way that actual atrocities are not. There's also the moral implications regarding True Crime's actual suffering being repurposed as vicarious entertainment, a notion studiously mined over the last few years as a literary trend, most strikingly in Alice Slater's ace 'Death of a Bookseller'. There is no such dilutory approach in Strange Harvest, however, no winking Haneke comment about the mode: this is a film which ventures to destabilise and appal. As the plot progresses, so do the lurid entertainments and the pitiless, undiscerning nature of Shiny's kills. Faces are burned off, hospital wards infiltrated, and the very sky splits open to usher in a newly minted horror villain.
But with that, what is so impressive about Strange Harvest is how controlled the tone is, how careful the pacing. It rivets you with its thorough filmmaking and the baroque heights of its Sadean imagination. Less The Poughkeepsie Tapes (grimy edgelord shit I couldn't make it through), more Lake Mungo, both for the attention to detail and unshakeable humanity of the ordeal, the palpable sadness which both films share. A cult film in perhaps more ways than one, for years to come, Strange Harvest is a film which will be shared amongst the horror cognoscenti like a terrible secret.
Strange Harvest is on UK/ROI VOD from October 27th.
