Strange Harvest had its world première on 22nd September at Fantastic Fest 2024
“There’s still so many things we don’t understand about this case, and probably never will. We just have bits and pieces of some kind of strange puzzle, and even if we could put them all together, I don’t know if I want to see what kind of picture they make.”
These words from San Bernardino homicide detective Joseph Kirby (Peter Zizzo) which both open and close Strange Harvest are also programmatic for the film, and delimit what is possible within its purported genre. For while this presents as a contemporary true crime documentary, tracking the sporadic spree of serial killer ‘Mr Shiny’ during 1995-2011 via footage pieced together from archival news broadcasts, police interviews, CCTV and home videos as well as to-camera testimony from a wide array of talking heads (police investigators, experts, survivors and victims’ families), it is also an elaborate fictive pastiche perpetrated by writer/director Stuart Ortiz, who as one half (with Colin Minihan) of the Vicious Brothers, had previously made Grave Encounters (2011) which similarly pretended to be ‘found’ raw footage from a real television show.
As Joseph and his detective partner Alexis ‘Lexi’ Taylor (Terri Apple) look back on Mr Shiny’s bizarre 16-year rampage against more than a dozen victims, and relate how their investigation not only identified the killer as one Leslie Sykes (Jessee Clarkson) but eventually tracked him down while he was in the process of committing another of his ‘harvestings’, in a sense the case is closed, and the documentary, made over a decade after the events, is just wrapping up something that was already resolved long ago – while also, of course, turning it into prurient sensationalism for the ‘true-crime’ viewer. Yet as Joseph’s voiceover implies, there are loose ends to this story that a documentary, following its tried and tested formulae of presentation, simply cannot take on and tie up, but which Ortiz, in films like Grave Encounters and Extraterrestrial (2014), loves to make his focus: the supernatural, the paranormal and the otherworldly. It is these aspects of the case – aspects which Joseph and Lexi try to push to the margins in their pursuit of legal truth and hard evidence – that repeatedly, insistently make themselves felt, and form a different ‘kind of picture’. Even the film’s subtitle, Occult Murder in the Inland Empire, points to something Lynchian beneath the sunny Southern Californian surface.
This alternative, unsettling view of events comes both from the ‘ritual’ nature of the crimes, all at once utterly random-seeming yet clearly fulfilling strict criteria that only the killer understands, and from the ranting, taunting letters that Mr Shiny leaves, Zodiac Killer-style, for the ‘blue baddies’ on his tail. For the content of these messages places everything that Sykes does within an ancient, indeed timeless narrative frame of witchery and woo-woo which lies beyond the scope of a retrospective programme on serial killers and police procedural – even if this unhinged fantasy might prove as real for the rest of us as for him, with evidence of its numinous celestial manifestation ultimately caught on multiple cameras. Which is exactly where Ortiz steps in, broadening the horizons of the documentary form both to accommodate cosmic horror via his own, more uncanny filmmaking, and to show a struggle between cop and killer that, as the stars align, might span multiple, parallel dimensions. It as though here, like in Michael Hurst’s recent Transmission (2023), beneath all television’s slick packaging, something Lovecraftian lurks in the darkness just off screen, biding its time to reemerge into our world and to leech off its reality.
strap: Stuart Ortiz’s true-crime mockumentary finds something Lovecraftian leeching off the reality ritualised by an elusive serial killer
© Anton Bitel
