Clickbait Carnage

Strange Harvest brings true crime documentaries to the horror genre

- WORDS: ROBBIE DUNLOP

STUART ORTIZ HAD LONG BEEN intrigued by the idea of developing a horror film in the style of a true crime documentary. But for years he kept the concept on the back burner, unsure whether audiences would fully grasp what he was aiming for. That changed in 2020 when Netflix’s Tiger King became a cultural phenomenon.

“There was a language that now existed,” he tells Red Alert. “I felt like, okay, now is the time. This could work, and people could be into this.”

The result is Strange Harvest, a chilling mockumentary that retraces the San Bernardino Major Crimes Unit's hunt for Mr Shiny, a sadistic serial killer who struck the Inland Empire in the ’90s, vanished without trace and reappeared a decade later to continue his brutal spree. Told primarily through interviews with homicide detectives Joseph Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Alexis Taylor (Terri Apple), the film relies heavily on naturalistic performances, something Ortiz says is “a nuanced and difficult thing to get right”.