Fantastic Fest is well underway with a host of exciting genre films playing at Austin, Texas' Alamo Drafthouse, including Terrifier 3 and Halle Berry's Never Let Go. More than 10 years after terrifying horror fans with found footage film Grave Encounters, Stuart Ortiz' spine-chilling Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire had its world premiere at the acclaimed festival.
The mockumentary, set in 2010, chronicles the crimes of a notorious serial killer named Mr Smiley who has baffled authorities in San Bernardino County with bloody and bizarre crime scenes that seem to have a link to occult practices. As Strange Harvest terrifies audiences at Fantastic Fest, FILMHOUNDS sat down with Ortiz to discuss his love of found footage, true crime's influence on the film, and the film's gore.
You've got Strange Harvest premiering at Fantastic Fest. How did you come up with the concept?
My first movie Grave Encounters, which was way back in 2011, is a found footage film, but we did have some sort of documentary elements in that movie. Ever since we made that film, it stuck with me that it was a really cool and interesting way to tell a horror story. It's something I hadn't seen done very often. Then, in 2020 when COVID hit, the documentary Tiger King blew up, and that was this huge phenomenon that captivated everyone who saw it. At its core, Tiger King is basically a true crime story, even though it has all this ridiculous stuff happening.
And it occurred to me at that moment that true crime was extremely popular — there was a huge appetite for it. I'd thought for the longest time that I was the only freak who liked to listen to these weird stories, but it seemed like everyone was interested. It just seemed like maybe the time was right, and there would be interest in something like this. All these ideas had been swirling in my head. I saw True Detective season one and they did a great job of having a straight police procedural while bringing in these cosmic elements. That was a huge inspiration for me, and then the true crime elements all came together. It just became this weird Frankenstein creation that is Strange Harvest.
We've had a massive true crime boom over the past few years, with podcasts, documentaries, and series popping up. It's raised the question of ethics and true crime as entertainment. As a fan of the genre yourself, where do you stand on that?
I think it's a positive thing in a way. These horrific stories about crime and murder — like any horror story — force us to face our mortality and to try to deal with the notion of death in the best way we can, depending on our belief structure. I think it's important because we all, as humans, need to deal with that. It's healthy. The thing about true crime is it provides people with a safe space to do that. It's always about commentary and context, and usually, someone is guiding you through the story and giving you perspective.
Typically, with true crime, these are events that have already happened—we're looking back at them rather than following something currently happening. So it creates a safe space for people to experience these stories. It's less confrontational than a horror movie, which is very in-your-face. True crime is more clinical and forensic in its approach, so it's easier for some people to experience these stories that way.
In Strange Harvest, we see a lot of grisly crime photos and crimes in general. How did you come up with the ideas for certain kills? They are very different.
I don't know where this stuff comes from. I don't know how to explain it exactly. I just know that one of my hopes is to always try to do something unique that hasn't been seen before. There's a particularly horrible kill in the movie involving someone trapped in that pool. That idea had been with me since the beginning. I had a pool growing up as a kid, and the thought of being trapped in it always stuck with me as a horrible thing. That plus the creature we involved made it an idea I couldn't resist. It's such a horrible way to go.
When using talking heads in the narrative, the lead performances are incredibly important, and I thought the lead cast you had in this film was great. How did they get involved in the project?
It was just a basic audition process, an open call. My only requirement was that I hoped we could have a man and a woman because I thought that dynamic would be interesting. Other than that, I didn't have any particular criteria regarding race, age, or anything like that. It was just the best actor or actress wins. I looked at a lot of people, but when Peter Zizzo and Terri Apple showed up, it was very apparent that it was them. It was a hard thing to cast because having a camera in your face for 85% of the movie means that if they betray anything, it completely reads on screen. You're capturing these performances without much between them, and it's a testament to their ability to nail it while keeping it so grounded and believable.
You mentioned your first feature film, Grave Encounters, which was also a found footage film. Was there anything from that project that you brought into this one — either things that worked and you reused, or things that didn't work, and you avoided?
I think what we learned from Grave Encounters was what we called “shit cam.” It's the concept of filming or capturing a moment in a way that feels awkward and kind of bad intentionally because that's often what reality looks like. Amateur camera work is usually not good — it's bad but interesting. There's this weird balance where you can tell the difference between camera work that feels authentically bad and camera work that's trying to look bad but doesn't feel genuine. What we took from Grave Encounters was getting in there and making our camera work feel bad in an authentic way. Sometimes, it meant giving the camera to someone who was literally an amateur and just telling them to film whatever, then editing it together to make it work. I think the biggest thing we took away was learning how to capture moments that feel candid and off the cuff.
Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024 on September 22.
