DARK HARVEST Review: Heads Will Split on Halloween

Sawtooth Jack is coming for you.

Dark Harvest
The film is available On Digital Friday, October 13, and will be screening one night only at select Alamo Drafthouse locations on October 11, via MGM Studios.

Director David Slade knows horror, and he hopes you do, too.

After directing music videos for more than 10 years, he made his feature debut with Hard Candy (2005), which is most definitely a horror movie, and followed that up with 30 Days of Night (2007), which was not entirely successful, yet showed his penchant for depicting terrifying creatures in a darkened world.

Over the past 10-12 years, he's sharpened his skills further by helming a variety of television shows, some of them very, very good (Breaking Bad, Hannibal). Slade's experience clearly shows throughout Dark Harvest, which is set primarily during the nights leading up to Halloween 1963 in a small Midwestern town.

That night is when an annual ritual is held in which a masked creature, supposedly "grown" in the adjoining cornfields over the past 12 months, wreaks murderous havoc upon the town, until or unless a crowd of high school students are able to kill the beast by any means necessary on a ritualistic "run" in which they chase down the creature. The boys have been locked in their rooms without food or water for three days, supposedly with the intent of making them madly ravenous for the blood of the beast.

In reality, of course, anyone who has been without food or water for three days would be incredibly weak and might pass out before taking three steps on the vaunted "run," but no matter. Logic be damned! There will be blood! And guts! Many, many guts.

Beyond the free-flowing blood, there are multiple heads that are split wide open. Indeed, the special-effects, make-up, and VFX teams have a field day in creating effects that are deliriously gory and step far across the line to come up with new ways for bodies to come apart. It's almost like it's a zombie movie!

Similar to 30 Days of Night and its vampires, Slade works well with enlivening material that originated on the printed page. Here, he is working from a screenplay written by Michael Gilio, adapted from a novel by Norman Partridge that was first published in 2006. The film focuses nearly entirely on Halloween night, though there is some buildup to establish why the annual ritual exists.

Richie (Casey Likes) is the younger brother of the previous year's winner of the "run" and thus is not eligible to participate, but he will do anything possible to join the event and establish his own bona-fides, despite the protestations of his protective parents (Jeremy Davies, Elizabeth Reaser). Richie befriends the new girl in town (E'myri Crutchfield), even though she is Black, because she displays a feisty spirit.

Richie's fellow students badger and bully him mercilessly, for reasons that elided me, but then, preening, villainous kids are always nasty in horror movies, even in 1963. (The film does a decent job of establishing the period through hairstyles, costuming, and set decoration, even if the screenplay imagines that young people in 1963 would talk like they do in 2023, casually using harsh profanities. Take it from an old person: teenagers didn't talk like that, even in the 70s.)

Dark Harvest is a horror thriller, after all, and the mythology takes a backseat to the gore for much of the running time, at least once the "run" proper begins. From there, it's a race who can avoid getting their head split open or intestines spilled out like a river of grue and blood.

In time, the story loops back to Richie's parents, and that's why you need Jeremy Davies as Richie's father. Davies, with his distinctive, skeletal voice and uniquely awkward phrasing, is the perfect Midwestern authority figure, hesitant and yet inhumanly strong for someone with such a slender frame. He's a splendid asset to balance the younger, less experienced cast members, who nonetheless give spirited performances.

To be fair, I've withdrawn from watching many horror movies over the past few years, so I am not the best at placing this film within the recent horror canon. As a non-expert in modern horror, I can still say that Dark Harvest fits the bill if you're looking for a simple tale of terror, filled with gore that looks diabolically evil.