The Two Masters of Strange Harvest

 While I was watching Eddington last month, I went to the bathroom during the trailers. When I came back the trailer for Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire was playing, and I got hooked, which is weird; the movie is a deliberate pastiche of horror and true-crime documentary, and I'm not really a fan of either genre. But something about the mystery of it all, trying to figure out what the fuck was happening, that got to me. So last night, I went out and saw it by myself and...I'm still trying to figure out what I thought about it? The short spoiler-free version is I felt that by trying to walk the line between conventional cosmic horror movie and documentary, it didn't really succeed at either. Spoilers from here on out. 

Content warning: Strange Harvest is a horror movie, and discusses topics like the death of children and pets, as well as torture, mutilation, and leeches. None of that will be shown in this post, but it will be discussed, and as such reader discretion is advised.

Hail Azragor

    The plot of Strange Harvest is actually pretty simple to follow, once you unpack it from the non-linear format of the story (in-universe, the documentary is being made over a decade after the end of the Mr. Shiny killings). Leslie Sykes, a kind of isolated fellow, stumbles into a cave while hiking and comes into contact with the Lovecraftian leech god Azragor (Hail Azragor). Through this, he falls down a rabbit hole of occultism, orchestrating a series of ritual murders over the course of twenty years in an attempt to summon Azragor (Hail Azragor) to bring about "The Extirpation." He ultimately fails, being shot dead by police during his last planned sacrifice. Ten years later, a documentary is made about his killings, with a post-credits scene revealing one of the detectives is still trying to hunt down that cave. Pretty simple, right? If this was a straightforward horror movie, it probably wouldn't be very good, it is elevated by the format. 

    The experience of watching the documentary, however, is watching that process of discovery happening. The name Leslie Sykes will not be mentioned until the police figure out who he is, instead using his alias "Mr. Shiny." I'm probably just being a bitch about this, but I feel like in a documentary sense like...you can just say his name from the beginning? Like, Ted Bundy documentaries have his name in the title. I don't know. My mom is a middle-aged white woman so she knows more about true crime than me, and she says it's pretty common, and I guess my favorite examples of the genre like the works of Abstract do the same thing. So maybe I'm just complaining about nothing, but it felt odd to me.

   Moving on from that, the actual horror bits...tend to lose their value. Mr. Shiny has a fairly standard MO once you piece things together: He looks for people with something going on in their blood (not any particular thing, just...something) and then murders them, removing a part of them and performing some sort of ritual. He has what I'd call the typical Movie Serial Killer superpowers of hypercompetence, able to sneak into heavily secured buildings, escape notice and such. This is explained in-universe through a combination of incredibly detailed research and magic (to be clear, the documentary doesn't treat magic as real, but it's pretty obviously what's happening.) But a lot of the "spooky" elements come from just showing a mutilated body and playing a spooky noise, which has diminishing returns over the movie's 15 murder victims (14 humans and a dog, whose corpse is curiously the only one censored). That's an average of one new corpse every eight minutes, and by victim number eight I was beginning to expect the musical sting, the close-ups of these bodies, when to my mind the scariest sequences were largely in my head, figuring stuff out on my own. Those four sequences were, in order of appearance/mention:

• The movie's first victims, the Sheridan family. They were set up across from each other at the table, cuts were made into their femoral artery, and they were forced to watch each other bleed out. This is kinda undercut by the constant cuts to their dead faces and the over-produced sequence examining the buckets and the "Going, going, gone," because then I was like okay I get it.
• A few more victims in we get Harold(?) Zao, whose tongue was cut out, and then he was forced into a swimming pool filled with leeches and lined with barbed wire so he couldn't escape. He was exsanguinated over the course of several days, and just thinking about him being trapped there that long...Christ. 
• Following Harold, leads go to Homer Johnson, a homeless man who wore someone else's diabetic bracelet as a piece of jewelry. He was hired by Mr. Shiny for day labor, and Shiny became extremely angry after learning Johnson wasn't actually diabetic. This revelation hit for me because I figured it out before the movie spelled it out like ten seconds later, and also reached the "Oh shit, he's looking for something in their blood."
• Also, just as an aside, does anyone else feel like its a little fucked up the homeless guy is named Homer? It feels like a pun of some sort. 
• The bit that got me the most was the webcam stream of a teenage girl shortly before she was murdered. While the actual killing itself was fairly quick and bloodless, involving her being shot in the head and back with a small-caliber pistol, the waiting, knowing what was going to happen had my eyes screwed shut. It was later revealed when she survived the attack and ended up at the hospital she was AB-, something that the movie thankfully didn't call attention to too much. 

    So yeah, the movie is at its scariest when it makes you think things in your mind. I tried explaining this to my mom and she simply responded "A book, you want a book." Harsh, but fair. The Poughkeepsie Tapes also had this focus on gore, at least from what I saw before I lost interest. It's a shame, because I think that something that leaned just a bit harder in the documentary space (using reimagineactments instead of just blam dead body, blam murder footage) would have hit a lot harder. This also maybe would have leaned harder into my other favorite part, the characters not knowing what kind of story they were in. The detectives live in a world where magic isn't real, so of course Mr. Shiny's bullshit abilities would have stumped them. Detective Man going off to find the Azragor cave at the end (Hail Azragor) kind of undercuts that. The horror of true crime is the horror of what we as people can do to each other without anyone ever understanding why, and augmenting that could be a fun space to play in. 

    Finally, I'm gonna talk about the thing that pissed me off the most. Like all serial killers in movies, Mr. Shiny sends letters to the police. We see these letters on screen...for half a second before it zooms in on what the filmmakers deemed were the "Relevant" portions as Microsoft Sam reads them while trying to be spoooooky. As someone who tries to read stuff like that, and was invested in the film's cosmology and hidden stuff going on, this was the equivalent of having the controller slapped out of my hands. Even the final letter, held to be the important one, cuts to "I will be back", the part I could have guessed! I felt like I was being punished for caring. When I got to the cave scene, I was mad, because they had the gall to tease an expanded universe while stopping me from getting into it. Which leads to my final conclusion:

This movie wasn't made for me.

    This movie was not made for the kind of person who sees a security guard being put into a blood eagle and goes "Oh hey a blood eagle." It wasn't made for someone who wanted to read all the notes, who wanted to enjoy watching a mystery being solved instead of watching the cops catch breadcrumb after breadcrumb while fighting an uncatchable superman. It was made as a horror movie first, with an interesting coat of paint. I just wish that coat had been more than skin deep.

    Hail Azragor.