One of the more hyped horror world premieres at this year's Fantastic Fest was Stuart Ortiz's Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire perfectly programmed in the midnight slot, leaving viewers shook and scared to return to their rented rooms in Austin, Texas.
In the vein of The Poughkeepsie Tapes and Lake Mungo, Strange Harvest presents a true crime tale through a mixture of mockumentary and found footage formatting. In 2010, a mysterious killer self-dubbed with the moniker of Mr. Shiny returned after a 15-year break to terrorize Southern California's Inland Empire, leaving the detectives on the case, Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple), scrambling to piece together the MO behind a series of truly rotten kills. As the details of Mr. Shiny's crimes unravel, it becomes clear that this is not just your standard maniac, and, as made evident by the film's title, more supernatural forces appear to be at play, as ominous symbols and bizarre glitches in reality all hint toward something stranger than fiction.
There's a gleeful mean streak running through Strange Harvest manifested in the extreme grisliness of Mr. Shiny's bloody reign of terror. While many found footage movies shy away from excessive gore, Strange Harvest revels in disgusting its audience with some painfully realistic corpse work courtesy of VFX whiz Josh Russell, who brought to life the terrifying, towering monster of David Bruckner's The Ritual. The visceral nature of these corpses almost feels like a call out to true crime lovers who want their media exploitative and explicit: Oh, you wanna see a dead body? Well, here's one that will stop you from sleeping for days.
Couple the uncomfortably lifelike gore with some realistically awkward talking heads and two effortlessly grounded performances from Zizzo and Apple, and Strange Harvest really does feel like something that, had it been released a few decades earlier, would've ended up making the rounds underground as something cursed and deeply dangerous; something you shouldn't be watching. The lines between fiction and reality are increasingly blurred, and horror fans still craving the rush of watching Noroi or the aforementioned The Poughkeepsie Tapes from a dodgy bootleg years before distribution should seek out Strange Harvest ASAP – legally, this time, of course!
Where Strange Harvest stumbles is in fleshing out its narrative. While less is arguably more when it comes to found footage, and many filmmakers in this format are prone to overexplaining themselves into a spiral of convoluted lore, Strange Harvest both reveals too much and too little when it comes to the mythos surrounding Mr. Shiny. Just enough about the mysterious killer is revealed that the character loses some allure, but not yet enough to clear up some of the more frustrating questions that the second half of the movie sets up. However, as Strange Harvest swings for the cosmic fences in its Kōji Shiraishi-inspired final act, it's impossible not to feel the chills of Ortiz's vision and with a promising sequel set up, hopefully, this won't be the last we see of Mr. Shiny and his disturbing legacy.
Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest 2024 on September 22.
