Stuart Ortiz (Grave Encounters 1 & 2, Extraterrestrial) is bringing horror fans another found footage delight with the true crime mockumentary Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire. Making its premiere at Fantastic Fest, Ortiz was inspired by the Netflix sensation Tiger King when developing this new film.
“In my first film that I made, which is called Grave Encounters, … it’s like a found footage-style film where the POV is the camera,” Ortiz told Yahoo Canada. “But we did have some elements in that film that were kind of a little bit more documentary. … I always just thought that was a cool way to approach a horror film. It was just a different way to tell that kind of story.”
“So it was always in my mind and then actually it was kind of during COVID, Tiger King got really big and it just occurred to me that there was this huge appetite for [a true crime story]. Tiger King at the core is a true crime story, even though it’s so absurd and has a lot of comedic elements.”
As Ortiz started thinking about and crafting the idea for Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire, a serial killer seemed to be his perfect subject.
The film is set in 2010 as San Bernardino County detectives are being interviewed about a terrifying serial killer case that’s haunted the area for decades. These killings, all with ritualistic patterns, were identified between 1993 and 1995, before the killer called Mr. Shiny (yes, that is an H. P. Lovecraft reference Ortiz is making) seemingly took a break for 15 years. The film has interviews with authorities and victims families, while also including footage of the brutal crime scenes.
In this mockumentary space, Ortiz stays particularly loyal to all the beats you would expect from a real true crime documentary.
“There is kind of a inherent rhythm to these things that we’re so used to seeing,” Ortiz explained. “So I think I did try to go for the hallmarks, and [with the] editing and the pacing, more than anything, trying to capture the tone of those documentaries.”
“Especially the more modern ones are very deliberate and they’re very methodic in how they sort of dole out the information. … I wanted to do something that just kind of captured the essence of a modern documentary.”
The filmmaker also highlighted that finding the right cast was particularly important to execute the concept.
“So much of this movie rides on the shoulders of the two leads, Peter Zizzo and Terri Apple, who I was just very lucky and fortunate to find, but they just both kind of got it,” he said. “They were super open to … the whole process.”
“It’s kind of a big ask for an actor to be like, ‘Hi. OK great, nice to meet you. We’re sitting down and we’re going straight into doing 15 pages of dialogue.’ … It’s a very unconventional kind of movie and we have these interviews, but then also there’s segments where there’s archival footage. … You don’t have the conventional crew and they have to be very trusting with what you’re doing.”
If you think the mix of adding mockumentary-style storytelling to a horror film would water down the scare, think again. It actually enabled Ortiz to go even more gruesome and shocking, taking inspiration from The Ring and Hereditary for some of the visuals.
“I knew I wanted to put some really horrific, rough stuff in this movie,” he said. “If the movie were to be made conventionally and it was done more like a standard narrative-style movie, I think it would just be gratuitous and too much.”
“But I knew that by anchoring it with these interviews that were going to be with these detectives, that were telling the story from a very sort of detached, clinical point of view, that I could get away with a lot with the imagery. And we do push it pretty far.”