Stuart Ortiz’s smart and inventive horror feature Strange Harvest is flying under the radar with most viewers. Produced in 2024 but not given any sort of wide distribution until 2025, it comes to Australia this week on DVD via Defiant Screen Entertainment. It is a modest release, and this is a film that deserves a more generously-sized audience than that.

A serial killer briefly stalks southern California during the 1990s. When they unexpectedly re-emerge almost two decades later, a pair of police detectives lead the hunt for the elusive “Mr Shiny”. Their investigation is represented through a faux documentary, styled as a Netflix-esque true crime special: combining “talking heads” interviews, crime scene photographs, and police body camera video recordings.

Ortiz does a masterful job of replicating the sensationalist tone and urgent delivery of true crime documentaries: it is paced like a thriller, and edited to constantly build suspense towards the next murder, or discovered clue, or crucial witness. There is an inevitably sleazy tone to this kind of documentary filmmaking, and while everything in Strange Harvest is fictional it is represented as a particularly over-the-top angle on factual matters.

The various television news reports are particularly well-developed, with a enormous sense of authenticity to them. Lead actors Peter Zizzo and Terri Apple do a sound job as police detectives Kirby and Taylor, as does the bulk of the supporting cast of witnesses and suspects. The only flaw in the casting is with Andy Lauer as a witness who comes late to the picture. These fictional documentaries and found footage movies only really work with a cast of unknowns, and fans of 1990s sitcom Caroline in the City may be momentarily thrown to see one of its stars participating in a serial murder investigation.

Viewers expecting the documentary format to distance Strange Harvest from any visceral moments of horror may be surprised at just how graphic and bloody the film is. Rather than diminish the more horrific elements, the matter-of-fact presentation enables Ortiz to showcase even more confronting imagery than might otherwise be accepted. The various murder victims – which include children – are realised to a confronting level of detail. This realism, which broadly disregards typical horror techniques of soundtrack, rising tension, and jump scares, enables the dread and the creepiness to build over the long-term. It is extremely effective.

Ortiz’s master stroke is in how he uses the factual television format to tell a horror story that is clearly supernatural in content. Regular fans of horror movies will recognise the tropes and archetypes as they emerge, but rather than being foregrounded they are aggressively obfuscated. The true crime format embraces the murders in ugly detail, but cannot allow itself to speculate at any length on the ritualistic elements or the references to ancient religions and gods. By the time the film reaches its climax, the presentation is largely governed by denial and disbelief. It is a striking approach, and a hugely effective one too.

Ortiz demonstrated great promise in 2011 when he and Colin Minihan co-directed the found footage horror movie Grave Encounters. Strange Harvest represents an extraordinary leap – in premise, in quality, and originality – and realises the potential that was clear in his first work. It is sad to see it receive such a limited release in Australia, because this is a film that horror fans should be rushing to see.