There were many big premieres at Fantastic Fest this year, which continues to solidify the ‘Fantastic’ in their name. Of all the premieres, one stuck out to me more than any: Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Emire. Grave Encounters and Extraterrestrial are two exceptional pieces of horror, and when I learned that one-half of the Vicious Brothers was debuting his solo directorial debut, I was sold.
I was speechless as the credits rolled. Strange Harvest is one of the most frightening, bone-chilling, and all-around fascinating mockumentaries I’ve ever seen. Ortiz’s commitment to authenticity makes Strange Harvest stand out as the best mockumentary this side of Lake Mungo. I was granted the opportunity to sit down and talk with the writer/director about his astounding solo debut and a possible connection it has to one of his earlier films!
An Interview with Strange Harvest Director Stuart Ortiz
Brendan Jesus: I cannot tell you how excited I am to be talking with you right now! Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire absolutely blew my mind. It was everything I wanted it to be. When people think of alien-related horror movies, they think Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Whitley Strieber’s Communion. To me, Extraterrestrial is one of the greatest alien-related horror films of all time. The scene in the cop car gave me nightmares; it paralyzed me.
Stuart Ortiz: Nice, nice!
BJ: Toward the end of Extraterrestrial, we see Kyle (Freddie Stroma) get a symbol laser etched into his chest. It’s a very triangular-like symbol. Is there any connection between that and Mr. Shiny’s symbol? Mr. Shiny’s symbol is a more minimalistic version of it, but is there a connection between them?
Stuart Ortiz: That is a fascinating question, and my answer would be there is a connection, actually. Albeit a weird one, but yes there is.
BJ: In any of your later works, will that become apparent? Or will that be more of a context clue, like the more you dig, the more you find?
Stuart Ortiz: It’s more for future things. The whole thing with Strange Harvest that I would love to do is, well, I have a lot more ideas for these kinds of stories that can be told in a similar manner. I kind of have a notion for a cinematic universe where I’d love to bring in some of the other things I’ve worked on in the past. All could maybe have a place.
BJ: Strange Harvest is your, unless you count Far West, which is 60 minutes so I don’t know if you consider that a feature–
Stuart Ortiz: No, no, I do not.
BJ: Okay, so then Strange Harvest is your singular feature directorial debut. After you made one of the greatest found footage movies of all time, you guys (Vicious Brothers) took a step back and did more “traditional” filmmaking with Extraterrestrial and It Stains the Sand Red. What made you want to go back to found footage/mockumentary for Strange Harvest?
Stuart Ortiz: I just always thought it was a cool way to approach a story, in particular a horror story. Grave Encounters is a found footage movie but we have this quasi-documentary element about it with interviews in the beginning. I love that stuff and had fun writing it. The experience of working on that always stuck with me and was always in the back of my head. It was a cool approach that no one had done justice to in that way. It lived in my mind for the decade-plus since we made that movie. I knew I would like to do something but didn’t know quite what it was. I’d always been a true crime nerd but felt like I was the only weirdo who liked these weird stories about horror, mayhem, and murder and whatnot. During COVID, Tiger King came out, and it was a big phenomenon. It was basically a true crime story at its core. That’s when it occurred to me that true crime was huge and had gone mainstream. It seemed like maybe the timing was right, and that this could be something people would get. We were at a point where there was enough of this stuff in the culture that people had the media literacy to get. If I played it totally straight, like that was the whole thing. I didn’t want to play this as a farce or a parody, I wanted to play it totally straight. That was the part that worried me. I just felt that the timing was right and there would be an appetite for it.
BJ: You’ve crafted this killer from the ground up. You created his motives and crimes, then thrust him into this world. The majority of evidence we see from Mr. Shiny comes from crime scene photos and it’s incredibly effective. How did you go about crafting these crime scene photos?
Stuart Ortiz: It was such a weird, unconventional approach to a movie. Usually, when you shoot a movie, you spend all this time beforehand setting up the scene, doing art direction, props, get the actors and cameras, move lights around. It takes a lot of time to set up the scenes and shots. Then you go into the second part where you’re shooting and that takes up a lot of time as well. It takes hours and hours. For us, we just had to do one part of that and it was the first part. We spent all of our time, budget, and resources on creating these sets basically. We spent a lot of time focusing on attention to detail. We were able to work with this makeup artist Josh Russell who’s a genius. He’s worked on stuff like The Ritual, the new Hellraiser, he’s incredibly talented. I don’t know how we got him, we got lucky! He was able to craft amazing makeup effects and some dummies for us. What you see is what you get. He did amazing work and it wasn’t hard to make them look creepy.
BJ: With the exception of a few mockumentaries, most don’t do a good job of continuing throughout their air of authenticity. Strange Harvest is one of the most authentic feeling mockumentaries I’ve seen. If you just uploaded this to YouTube, I think you’d dupe a lot of people into thinking this was legitimate. Was there anything you did specifically to create and keep this level of authenticity?
Stuart Ortiz: That’s a good question. Attention to detail, across the board, on all the aspects–something like the news. We have archival news footage, little snippets of news programs, you know a lot of that blows my mind to this day. I’ll watch a hundred-million-dollar superhero movie and they’ll cut to the jankiest, shittiest news footage you’ve ever seen. It’s like you have all that money and it’s annoying. Everyone knows what news footage looks like. Everyone has seen it. You see it every day! Everyone has an understanding, so it never makes sense to me why that kind of stuff is missed. Sometimes it’s just because it’s an afterthought. With our shoot, those things weren’t an afterthought. Some days we would go shoot something somewhere, and then the other half of the day would be six or seven hours in a studio shooting newscasters. By most movie scheduling standards it was bonkers and ridiculous, but that’s just how we had to do it. I knew that’s what was necessary to get it right. It’s all in the details.
BJ: The mask design. It gave me nightmares for two nights. Could you talk about the design of the mask?
Stuart Ortiz: I like to hear that. That mask was designed by Jessee Clarkson, who was our production designer on the film. Brilliant guy. He also plays Mr. Shiny. He wanted to do that. He’s played killers before, like in The Vault. He had a real vision for it and was inspired by Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Really, the mask is very simple. It’s a creepy-looking face, but it’s the symbol. The sigil motif of these three dots–which is a thing that plays throughout the film.
I’m super thankful to Stuart for taking the time to talk with me, as well as KWPR for setting it all up. If you missed Strange Harvest at Fantastic Fest, you need to keep your eyes peeled for the next showing of this film.
Whether you’re a fan of true crime or not, Strange Harvest is a diamond in the rough–a terrifying true crime tour de force.
Make sure to keep your doors locked, lest you find yourself the next victim of Mr. Shiny.
