Strange Harvest
by Hope Madden
Strange Harvest is an evocative title. It conjures all kinds of folk horror notions, or better still, body horror. Mysterious, right? And what better way to solve a mystery than by working with the detectives on the case?
Writer/director Stuart Ortiz’s latest horror film takes on the eerily realistic shape of a true-crime TV show. In fact, it often recalls I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the series built on Michelle McNamara’s investigation into the Golden State Killer. Tapping into the true crime phenomenon without actually delivering truth, just fiction, can be a tough go.
Luckily, Ortiz has some genuinely horrifying ideas to present. The crime scenes littered throughout the investigation are the stuff of nightmare. And though a couple feel almost Saw inspired, most are jarringly original and truly ghastly.
They suggest the work of a true sadist, and fleeting images of the killer himself—masked and unmasked—unsettle. Strange Harvest boasts an awful lot of pieces working together to get under your skin.
Ortiz stitches this footage together with studio interviews of the investigators, Det. Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Det. Lexi Taylor (Terri Apple). Here’s where the authenticity begins to thin. Heavy-handed writing paired with, especially in Zizzo’s case, obvious performance delivers something far more staged and artificial than what the balance of the film offers.
They also leech the film of a lot of the horror and tension being built by these horrifying crime scenes. One of the few notions not pulled from McNamara’s show is the focus on the victims. That kind of human underpinning, handled so well by Anna Kendrick in her 2024 directorial debut, Woman of the Hour, might have created the empathy Ortiz seems to be trying for with the investigator interviews.
Feeling for someone—frightened for them, compassion for them—deepens the impact of any horror film. There were certainly opportunities to help us care what happened at each crime scene, but instead we’re asked to be frustrated with the investigators. That can work. Zodiac made it work, but of course that was David Fincher and we were actively investigating with the police, not privy to their trauma after the fact.
The Poughkeepsie Tapes, John Erick Dowdie’s 2007 found footage style horror, steers much closer to the road Ortiz is taking, and because we hear more from and about victims, it leaves deeper scars.
There’s a lot Strange Harvest has going for it, but Ortiz and his cast never fully deliver on the promise of the title.
