Crew
Director – David Slade, Screenplay – Michael Gilio, Based on the Novel Dark Harvest (2006) by Norman Partridge, Producers – David Manpearl & Matt Tolmach, Photography – Larry Smith, Music – Brian Reitzell, Visual Effects Supervisor – James McQuaide, Visual Effects – Celluloid Visual Effects (Supervisor – Michael Landgrebe), Final Secret Studio (Supervisor – Rangi Sutton), Future Associate (Supervisor – Lindsay Adams), Reality Butcher (Supervisor – Adam Ruboczi), SlateVFX (Supervisor – David Booth) & Studio Blackbird (Supervisors – Wil Manning & Nick Ponzoni), Special Effects Supervisor – Davin MacRae, Sawtooth Jack Created by Vincent Van Dyke Effects, Inc., Makeup Effects Designer – Francois Dagenais, Production Design – Patti Podesta. Production Company – MGM.
Cast
Casey Likes (Richie Shepard), E’Myri Crutchfield (Kelly Haines), Jeremy Davies (Dan Shepard), Elizabeth Reaser (Donna Shepard), Luke Kirby (Officer Jerry Ricks), West Mulholland (Mitch Crenshaw), Alejandro Akara (Bud), Dustin Seithamer (Sawtooth Jack), Maclean Fish (Charlie Gunther), Austin Autry (Riley Blake), Ezra Buzzington (Farmer), Carter Heinz (Marty), Britain Dalton (Jim Shepard)
Plot
1962 in the small town of Bastion, Illinois. Jim Shepard wins the annual Halloween Run where he must kill Sawtooth Jack, a murderous pumpkin-headed creature that rises from the cornfields, before it reaches the church. For this, Jim wins a new car and prize money to depart the town. One year later, Jim’s younger brother Richie wants to enter the Halloween Run, despite urgings from his family not to. Richie defies this. He is joined by Kelly Haines, who wants to enter the Run despite girls not being allowed. As the Run starts with Sawtooth Jack rising and killing those in its way, Richie begins to discover disturbing secrets about the town.
For a time, British director David Slade was looking to be a promising genre face. Slade first appeared with the riveting Hard Candy (2005) with underage Ellen Page torturing paedophile Patrick Wilson. In short course, Slade went to Hollywood to make the vampire film 30 Days of Night (2007) and then the Twilight sequel Eclipse (2010). However, after seeming to hit the big leagues, we barely heard a peep from Slade throughout the 2010s. He did direct the The Way to Egress episode of the anthology Nightmare Cinema (2018) and has been active in tv on shows like Breaking Bad (2008-13), Hannibal (2013-5), American Gods (2017-21) and Black Mirror (2011- ), including the celebrated award-winning interactive episode Bandersnatch (2018) of the latter. However, Dark Harvest was Slade’s first full-length film in thirteen years.
The film is adapted from Dark Harvest (2006) by US horror writer Norman Partridge, which won the Bram Stoker and several other awards when it came out. It falls into a small subsector of American Folk Horror works where, opposed to the predominant British counterparts that draw from Celtic mythology, is focused on Puritanism, Appalachian backwoods rituals and midwestern cornfields. The most well-known incarnation of this is Stephen King’s Children of the Corn (1984) and its phenomenal number of sequels. There are several other works about backwoods entities and things in the cornfield coming to life as with Pumpkinhead (1988), Husk (2011) and Sator (2019), as well as quite a number of such films set around Halloween.
Sawtooth Jack is quite an unearthly creation, played by an actor with an unnaturally tall thin body. David Slade doesn’t stint when it comes to horror effect with bodies thrown into the air against the moon as they are severed in two, another with half its head sliced open, heads torn off and a bunker that a group are sheltering in erupting in a massive shower of blood.
Slade gives the film a 1960s setting with the cars, music and clothing, not to mention a double-bill of Boris Karloff and Vincent Price films playing at the town movie theatre. What knits Dark Harvest together is a decent story that comes together particularly well during the last quarter of the show, providing a number of twists that keep going as the credits roll.
Trailer here