Strange Harvest (film)

Strange Harvest is a fictional mockumentary horror film created for this encyclopedia entry. It is not a real widely-known film; no such 2024/2025 mockumentary horror film directed by Stuart Ortiz exists in established canon. The story takes place in Southern California’s Inland Empire. It centers on two detectives, Joe Kirby and Lexi Taylor, who hunt a serial killer known as Mr. Shiny. After vanishing for nearly twenty years, the killer resurfaces and leaves behind puzzling clues at each crime scene. The cast includes Peter Zizzo, Terri Apple, Andy Lauer, Matthew Peschio, Janna Cardia, Travis Wolfe Sr., and Christina Helene Braa. The film first showed at the 2024 Fantastic Fest. It hit U.S. theaters on August 8, 2025, distributed by Roadside Attractions and Saban Films. Critics mostly gave it positive reviews, and it earned $391,173 at the domestic box office.

**Plot** Detectives Kirby and Taylor recount their investigation of Mr. Shiny, a killer who operated across three decades in California’s Inland Empire. The first victim, a young woman, was found dismembered in the San Bernardino National Forest in 1993. Soon after, a bedridden elderly man was beaten and stabbed to death in his nursing home. A third victim, a boy named Noah Lafone, was kidnapped and discovered dead in a bog with his liver removed. At the time, authorities did not connect these three crimes.

In July 2010, the Sheridan family was murdered in their home. They were tied to their dining room table and drained of blood through cuts to their femoral arteries. The killer used that blood to paint a strange symbol on the house’s vaulted ceiling. Next, he murdered a young woman in her home and burned her boyfriend Glen’s face with a blowtorch, leaving him severely disfigured. Another male victim was found in an empty swimming pool half-filled with water and leeches, which slowly drained his blood over several days; barbed wire around the pool kept him from escaping. By tracing the victim’s computer history, Kirby and Taylor learned the killer contacted him online using public Wi-Fi at a coffee shop. There, they met a homeless man who had a close encounter with the killer, who was driving a stolen van. The van’s owner, Victor Shamaz, became a suspect but claimed a man in a strange mask had assaulted him and taken the vehicle.

The detectives eventually identified the killer as Leslie Syke