Reaping the Strange Harvest

Mr. Shiny, the killer with a motivation far beyond mere slaughter in Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire (Courtesy of Fantastic Fest)

Starsky and Hutch. Mulder and Scully. Now, the annals of great fictional cop duos can add Kirby and Taylor, the protagonists of new horror mockumentary Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire, to their roll call.

The chilling and disturbing mockumentary has been shocking audiences since its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September. SInce them, it pulled off a trifecta last weekend by screening at LA's Beyond Fest, the HP Lovecraft Festival in Portland, and Grimm Fest in Manchester, England, and now heads to Provo, Utah for FilmQuest on Oct. 30, just in time for Halloween.

Strange Harvest mimics the true crime format of the early 2000s, focusing on the multi-decade crime spree of a bizarre and mysterious killer known as Mr. Shiny, and most especially on the two detectives – Joe Kirby (Peter Zizzo) and Alexis "Lexi" Taylor (Terri Apple) – putting the clues together and finding more than the archetypical psychopath.

Zizzo described the film as unlike most mockumentaries because “generally speaking they wink at the audience – they’re either attached to something comedic or a high concept in a silly way. This is a deadly serious, creepy mockumentary – but we’re not mocking.” It's also far gorier than true crime docs of the era, like a friend at the TV network smuggled you a rough cut of the show from before Standards & Practices could censor it. "It's the pre-blur version," Zizzo laughed.

The mockumentary format’s a new one to filmmaker Stuart Ortiz, but he’s no stranger to non-conventional storytelling. As half of the Vicious Brothers, with Colin Minihan (What Keeps You Alive) he put a fishhook in audiences' eyes with the Grave Encounters movies, establishing his skills in found footage. But just as every filmmaker thinks found footage is easy until they do it, so Ortiz had a learning curve with the mockumentary. However, he was very aware of some of the common mistakes that can break the magic of mockumentaries. He explained, “I always find it very bizarre in a hundred-million-dollar studio movie that you’ll see some shot from the news and it looks like some cheesy thing with a green screen. We all have such a good frame of reference from the news because we watch the news every day.”

“The news is not hard to get right!" he added. “Just shoot on the correct cameras. ... We shot on appropriate cameras for the era, I made appropriate graphics for the era. We spent maybe six to eight hours shooting just a newscaster with background saying three to four lines, because that's what it took to get it right.”

That thinking sums up much of how he approached Strange Harvest and making it look like a real TV show. “Just do it for real. ... A lot of the time, those kind of elements are an afterthought. For me, they are front and center.”

Peter Zizzo as Det. Joe Kirby in Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire (Courtesy of Fantastic Fest)

Austin Chronicle: It’s about time someone had a serial killer from Branson, Missouri.

Stuart Ortiz: Yes! Thank you for picking up on that reference. Finally, someone has pointed that out.

Joe Kirby: What is it?

SO: It’s like the Vegas of the Midwest, but with a much smaller budget.

Terri Apple: I know Branson. I’m from Kansas City, but Branson’s a small town. Very hometown, nice people. The BTK Killer was from a similar kind of town.

SO: I found it to be a cursed place that I did not like whatsoever. It was very corny to me. I hate all that Vegas stuff, but it’s just so strange. It’s so weird.

AC: Silver Dollar City, the amusement park there, is so bizarre. There’s these incredible rides, and then there’s historical reenactments so you can can your own peaches.

SO: I don’t want to disparage the Missourians, they’re very nice people, but I was honestly afraid for my safety on some of those rides.

JK: And those peach canners …

AC: The mockumentary format of having you two as talking heads in a TV show, and separate a lot, that must create some interesting acting challenges to make it feel like you two are really partners and know each other.

JK: He did a clever thing where we are together form improv scenes in a house, and there are a couple of scripted interrogation scenes, and there’s the scenes of us going through a storage facility or a house where Terri and I got to improv with each other. But we didn’t have any one-on-one, two detectives like Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt – who I think we both resemble, and I won’t say which is which – so it was a very interesting challenge for us, because it was all monologue.

TA: But from the minute we met it organically came together. And we found out after that we have a friend in common that he was in a fraternity with, but we didn’t know any of that then. We just met as actors.

SO: It came down to the casting. I met two amazing people and I saw them as the characters, and the dynamic that those characters have is exactly what I thought it would be.

“The news is not hard to get right! Just shoot on the correct cameras!” Stuart Ortiz, writer/director of Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire, on getting the look of his faux documentary right. (Image Courtesy of Fantastic Fest)

I remember, the very first day, we shot at this hospital set and we were shooting these surveillance camera angles. That’s how the scene is shown, all from the surveillance cameras, and we just did this walk-and-talk that wasn’t scripted – I think maybe I gave you guys something to work with – and it’s walking a U, basically. There’s always this moment where you think, ‘Is this gonna work or not?’ and right away I could see the dynamic, that it was working, that it was just right, and so much of that comes down to chemistry and finding the right people.

JK: He said he saw us as these characters, and when I auditioned I was positive I was this guy. I was positive I knew how to play him, I was positive I knew what research I was going to do, and how I was going to get into it – and then I thought I hadn’t got it. A couple of weeks went by, didn’t hear anything, and then the part seemed to be back up on (casting site) Breakdown Express because it said “Joe Kirby” and I thought, ‘Oh, I definitely didn’t get it.’ Turns out, he already had me at the top of the list but they hadn’t cast Lexi Taylor, but they were using Joe Kirby’s monologues for some of those auditions. I didn’t even know Taylor was going to be female.

SO: That was the thing. Their parts weren’t written for any particular ethnicity or gender. It was just ‘best actor wins.’

TA: And I really wanted to play that part. The minute I read those two scenes, I really wanted to take a chunk out of this role but I was scared to do it.

SO: I remember we had a phone call.

TA: Yeah, I was like, ‘No. Terri, how are you going to handle this on set?’ But the set was a blast. It’s the opposite of what you see. So professional, so phenomenal, and I was so thrilled.

AC: The ‘best actor wins’ thing is interesting It's like Amy Madigan in Streets of Fire. The part was written for a middle-aged Hispanic guy, and Walter Hill just went, 'Nah, I'm going to make her a 30-something woman instead.' So that shows how much faith you had in your casting. How much did having this pair in particular affect the characters?

SO: I didn’t change the script that much. Maybe a few references, here and there, when it needed to be updated, but I really didn’t change it that much, because they really fit in my head what I was thinking. They just got the energy and it felt right. And honestly, all these questions of gender and ethnicity and race and backstory and where these people are coming from, they’re sort of irrelevant to the documentary format. We do have a part when they talk about their past and that’s really important for who they are, but for the most part, unlike a more standard movie, you’re not going to get these longwinded things where they’re talking about themselves, ‘here’s stuff from my personal life.’ They’re there because they’re professional law enforcement officers.

Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire

USA, 2024, 94 min.
World premiere

Follow all the Chronicle’s 2024 Fantastic Fest coverage.