Director Stuart Ortiz’s new film, Strange Harvest: Occult Murder in the Inland Empire, had its world premiere at last month’s Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. The film is described as “A faux true-crime documentary about two detectives’ pursuit of an infamous serial killer named Mr. Shiny, who terrorized Southern California for almost two decades,” but that doesn’t even begin to describe the journey the viewer will take when watching the film.
Strange Harvest is perhaps the most fully-realized mockumentary we’ve ever seen, but even calling it that feels like a disservice. Within five minutes, the “faux” part of the documentary falls away, and it’s as though an untold story is playing out onscreen. It’s absolutely immersive, and creates a sense of reality not seen since the original Blair Witch Project 25 years ago.
While writer/director Stuart Ortiz has delved into found footage before with cult favorites Grave Encounters, Extraterrestrial, and Grave Encounters 2 as part of the Vicious Brothers with fellow writer/director Colin Minihan, the attention to detail in Strange Harvest is next level work. Were it to be put on a streamer alongside American Murder: The Family Next Door or I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, an unsuspecting viewer would never know that it’s fiction.
We hopped on Zoom with Strange Harvest‘s writer/director Ortiz, along with actors Peter Zizzo and Terri Apple, who play detectives Joe Kirby and Lexi Taylor, respectively.
STARBURST: Stuart, what was the original impetus for this? We know you’ve worked in found footage before, but this seems like this is a much different and much bigger project.
Stuart Ortiz: Grave Encounters had a little bit of a documentary aspect. There were some interviews and stuff like that, but the idea of doing a horror movie just kind of always stuck with me. I always thought it was a cool way to tell a horror story that I hadn’t seen done that much, so it was just kind of in my brain.
For the longest time, I thought I was the only weirdo who was really into these weird true crime stories about murder and mayhem and whatnot, but then, during Covid, Tiger King came out. That was a big phenomenon and was extremely popular and Tiger King is a true crime story at its core, that’s what it is. It just occurred to me that the timing was right, that true crime had gone mainstream, and that there was an appetite for something like that. It was all swirling and then, of course, just mixed in with my love of True Detective season 1 and all of the greats, like Silence of the Lambs, all of the great serial killer stuff just swirled together into this Frankenstein monster that is Strange Harvest.
Peter and Terri, what appealed to you about the script for this that made you want to do it?
Peter Zizzo: Speaking for myself, I still don’t know how my manager had a copy of the actual script. It’s always nice to get an audition for a feature, and I love horror. It’s arguably my favourite genre. What appealed to me about the script was it was a story I couldn’t put down and something that I could visualize like, “Wow, if this works, this would be a really unique, creepy, super intense horror movie.” I also immediately knew how it approached that character. I knew I just could see him n my mind and just really hoped that I’d get the chance to to do it
Terri Apple: I saw just a couple of scenes. I loved the character and I love the script, but I didn’t read the script ’til after I got offered the role. That being said, the small things that I did read for, I just loved this character and I got her and I got the backstory and I wanted to play that character. I did not know this was gonna be a thriller/homicide Blair Witch type of thing. It’s so fantastic, but I didn’t know that it was going to play out like that. I don’t think I realized that. I just wanted to play Lexi Taylor and I loved the writing and I love the idea and I love the script.
What were the challenges in putting this together, because Peter and Terri, you’re both essentially sitting in a warehouse talking to a camera? We’re curious from Stuart’s perspective, how much he had prepared so that you two had an idea of what you were talking about. Had you seen any of the still images that open up the film of some of the past crimes or anything like that?
Stuart Ortiz: I’m trying to think. I don’t think so, because of the way we shot it. Even if we had some material, I don’t think we had the ability to really show it off yet, per se. There wasn’t anything really to show them at all. It was all just explaining, “This is what the crime scene is going to be.”
Peter Zizzo: We filmed it not chronologically, but the first official day was me saying, “My name is Detective Joe Kirby.” The very first thing was the hospital where I literally walked past the guy. Luckily, we all are fans of that genre o you can catch a vibe by watching a lot of those shows.
Stuart Ortiz: I was just always saying, “It’s going to look fucked up. It’s going to be good. It’s going to be deranged.”
Terri Apple: For me, personally, I just played her as the character and I knew that we were being interviewed as the character. I didn’t really have a subplot in my brain. I didn’t have any idea how it was going to physically play out. I knew we had days where we were going to shoot on-site of certain things.
I think it did help to already have one scene that we had done, but I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m in a warehouse being an actor with this.” In fact, Stuart, to me, wasn’t even the director. Sturt was the guy interviewing me. These people were actually part of this interview process and I’m still Lexi Taylor in this moment.
How did everyone get into character for this?
Peter Zizzo: Well, for me, Stuart was very specific about micro-expressions, Even in the audition we did, it was like, “Show me those micro-expressions.” I think that literally is something [Stuart] said.
What I did was I pay a lot of attention to interviews with actual detectives in true crime stuff, and I have a therapist, and she said, “Hey, I know a retired homicide detective in New York. He’s a real character. You should talk to him.” I talked to him a couple of times and I really noticed he had a sort of stoic way of describing really horrible things that he had firsthand witnessed, and it made me think about how haunted one must be by what you’ve seen.
You’ve had to deliver also such horrible information to families of victims, and I thought there’s a lot of pain inside of Joe Kirby, and so I tried to play him in such a way that he’s looking you in the eye, but you can tell that on some level he’s very troubled by what he’s telling you but the trick is don’t play it. Don’t let him see that you’re acting when you do it.
It’s also a credit to the quality of the writing that I was able to play it the way I did and credit to that our characters are a little different. There are different harmonics with Lexi Taylor than there are with Joe Kirby, and so [Stuart] clearly cast the right actors, and we were able to just attack those and create two very different detectives. But what we have in common is the level of empathy we have and the level of horror that we, that we have at what we’ve experienced.
It could have been really boring. You know, if you just play it flat, then it’s boring, so you have to find the levels, and you have to do it in such a way that you believe that you’re really watching a detective talking about a case.
Stuart, this is not a small film. Your previous films haven’t been small at all, but Strange Harvest has many different aspects. There are the interview portions, footage from security cameras, and vintage news footage. There are body cams from the cops. How do you even go about shooting all of this and making it look appropriate for each thing that it is?
Stuart Ortiz: The best approach is usually doing things real for real. Those are real body cams that are really on their chest, you know? The news stuff, we spent a lot of time. We had a very unconventional way we shot this. The schedule was very strange. There was a couple of days where we would shoot in one location, break, and then go to a studio and literally spend the next eight hours at a studio just to shoot one of those news segments of a person just saying one line, because that stuff was really important to me to get right.
It blows my mind when I watch a 100 million dollar movie with fake-looking news footage. We know what news footage looks like. We all have the frame of reference. We see it every day, so it was just important for me to get all that stuff right. And you know, it’s just like, do it for real. I just hate it when people shoot webcam footage with an ARRI ALEXA or whatever.
It’s just like, “Shoot it with a webcam. It’s gonna look like crap. That’s what it should look like.” I don’t have any problem surrendering to what the format is. I think that that’s interesting.
Now that the film is completed and locked–Peter and Terri, what was your initial response to seeing it all the way through and seeing how all of these things weave together?
Terri Apple: I was pretty impressed. I didn’t have any preconceived notions other than like, “I hope it doesn’t look fake.” I watched the movie a lot with my hands over my eyes, I was told by my co-star Peter and by my writer/director Stuart and by my friend when we saw the director’s cut.
Stuart looked at me after and when Peter looked at me after he goes, “Terri, you just watched that film and your hands were over your eyes,” and I go, “I know, but that’s Lexi Taylor. That’s not me. I have a different reaction than her. I played her as Lexi Taylor but I didn’t say I was going to be able to handle it.”
Yeah, I have to say, there wasn’t a fake moment. I was very impressed with the lineup of scenes and the way things went down. Peter, I think you had a girlfriend there at the time that watched it and didn’t see really a speck of me or Peter, so that was a big compliment. I got to watch it very objectively to say, “Holy shit, this real.” You see the script, but it’s very different than you’re on set, but when you’re actually then watching it? Yeah. I had a hard time, actually. Yeah.
Peter Zizzo: A group of us went and I actually was sitting pretty much next to Terri. I had that feeling of guilt when you realize you’re watching something that really isn’t appropriate for the person that you brought to see it except that she’s the fucking co-star of the movie. It was hilarious to me and I felt kind of guilty.
Terri Apple: Oh, that’s hysterical. You felt guilty thinking, “Oh, I feel bad I brought her to see this film.”
Peter Zizzo: I had to remind myself, “No, don’t feel guilty. She’s the other lead in the movie.” That was really cool.
Stuart Ortiz: And we’re going like, “Should we make her leave? She should go in the other room for parts of this. We can just sort of explain what’s happening to her so she doesn’t have to watch it.”
Peter Zizzo: Stuart did some rewrites much later and I had to come back one day to just add a couple of lines and they had to recreate the whole interview environment and set it and so I hadn’t played him in a while, but I thought to myself, “Eh, I’ll get right back into it,” and it took a minute.
I had to take maybe four or five takes before I read found the voice of this guy. Ironically, it made me feel really good about that I had really created a character from this. I loved it. First time I saw it, I was like, “Okay, I know I’m close to this and I can’t stand watching myself in it, but this is a really, really, really good horror movie,” and it’s easily Stuart’s best.
Terri Apple: My cousin, Ronnie, who I did not show was going to come up to the screening, she’s pretty tough. Edgy, tough, just Boston smart. This woman does not brag about anything and she’s very honest and she just looked at me afterwards and I thought, “Oh fuck, she’s gonna hate it. What’re you gonna say to me?” She’s like, “Oh man, Terri –you did it,” so that’s a testament to the movie and the way that it plays. One of my best friends since we were 14 years old said, “Terri, I didn’t see you at all.” She knows every side of me.
It’s a movie that, within about five minutes of starting it, you forget that it is a fictional movie and you’re not watching an hour-and-a-half-long actual documentary. The film gets its official premiere this weekend as part of Fantastic Fest. What’s it like to have this playing a genre fest of such reknown?
Stuart Ortiz: It’s a dream come true, man. I’m super stoked. I think that this is like a movie that’s tailor made for like a Fantastic Fest crowd. I think they’re going to love it. I’m a fan of this stuff. This is the kind of movie that, when I was 14 or something, if I had seen it, it would have, I would have blown my own mind.
Peter Zizzo: If I saw it now, I’d be obsessed with it, honestly. That’s true.
Terri Apple: I think something that makes a film successful in my brain, just the way you’re speaking right now and saying, usually you’re drawn to a film based on that genre, right? But even in the movie theater, when we just did the cast and crew, Stuart has the sweetest, kindest parents that are so just straight-laced and cool and they’re sitting in there watching it. Oh, I mean, they were adorable. Everybody was so different from one another as far as background, ethnicity, economic status, and everybody pretty much had the same reaction on this film. I think that’s a sign of a compliment, to be honest with you.
Strange Harvest: Occult Murder In The Inland Empire has its West Coast premiere as part of Beyond Fest this Friday, October 4th. Details and tickets available at the Beyond Fest website.
