Continuing on with the folk horror theme for the week, I am looking at another movie that has many of the same trappings of traditional folk horror without the typical European setting. This time we are taken to a small, Midwestern American town. It’s based on the novel of the same name which I haven’t read so I wont be able to compare to the original.

As mentioned, our setting is a small Midwestern town somewhere in America during the early 1960’s. Every Halloween a monster named Sawtooth Jack rises from the corn fields and makes its way to the local church. It’s up to the young boys of the town to compete in “The Run” where they try to kill it before it can reach the church so as to prevent tragedy from befalling the small hamlet. The boy that manages to take down old Sawtooth Jack wins a brand new car and a ticket out of the tiny town while his family gets a new house and $25,000 which is an absolutely bonkers amount of money for 1962. Jim Shepard won it the previous year and now, one year later, his brother, Richie, is determined to win The Run as well so he can finally escape but the Sawtooth Jack isn’t the only dark secret in this town.

Dark Harvest is a fun movie that feels like a Stephen King story at first before descending into The Purge by the second act. The boys of the town are locked in their room for 3 days without food or company in order to “get them hungry” for The Run. By the time they are let out on Halloween, the town goes absolutely berserk with the pent-up insanity of dozens of teenage boys let loose. The little glimpses we get of The Run from the opening make it seem much less chaotic but after what happens in the year that the movie centers on, I have to wonder if it’s even worth it for the town. Which is one of the weaknesses of the movie, we don’t really get a lot of information on how exactly it is this town has a regular monster and nobody outside of it seems to know or care. What little background information we do get is almost entirely an Act 1 exposition dump.

I do love the main characters in this. Well, the main teenage characters. Richie (Casey Likes) and Kelly (E’myri Crutchfield) have great chemistry and I love the dynamic between them. I would have loved to have seen more of Richie’s friends and got a bit more character development on everyone before shit popped off so you gave a shit about them. There are some memorable kills in this with some impressively shot creepy scenes. Also, production did a great job of making it look and feel very 60’s. The time period feels very right for the story with the idea of sending out young boys to die against some monster that would have nebulous consequences if it isn’t stopped fits right in with the Vietnam War era.

The movie is a lot of fun with some great monster design and an interesting hook. I will say, the “ending” is not great but the real ending is about a minute into the credits, so be sure to stay for that if you end up watching this.

Score: 4 out of 5