Strange Harvest seems to have impressed a number of viewers, but for someone attuned to religion and horror it rang false.  The Lovecraftian elements appear with the idea of a serial killer who’s the devotee of an unfamiliar god.  The story is presented as a documentary, interviewing the detectives who resolved the case, intercut with crime scene footage—often quite graphic and gory—and trying to get to the bottom of this case.  So a guy named Leslie Sykes has been killing people in San Bernardino county since 1995.  He took a hiatus in his killing spree to go to Jerusalem, after seeing something in a cave while out hiking and experiencing a religious mania.  From Jerusalem he goes to Damascus and then into Europe, learning about religions, apparently, before stealing a grimoire from a bookshop in Germany.  He’s pretty clearly trying to raise an unorthodox deity, but the police don’t connect the dots.

After his years’ long absence, he starts killing again in order to have his last sacrifice ready when a rare triangular alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn will be visible with the naked eye.  He is stopped from his final murder attempt by the police, but witness cameras captured some strange cosmic event starting to unfold as the final victim is about to be immolated.  I’m not a fan of this kind of movie but what really made it seem less authentic was the stitched together nature of this religion.  It is never spelled out, it is true, but what is shown does not seem to add up to any coherent system.  The movie does an effective job of creating a scary sociopathic killer, but it implies that the religion responsible is real.  A religion of one, however, isn’t really a religion at all.

Again, critics seem to have liked this but I found the actions of the police inscrutable and the grotesque methods of torture and execution unequal to the task of suggesting how these might be connected into even a psychotic religious outlook.  The only thing that seems to connect them is an occult symbol left behind at the crime scenes.  The letters from the killer to the police are read only in part, and that by some kind of synth voice that’s probably meant to make them sound sinister.  This kind of horror can work, but in general, creating new religions is not as easy as it looks.  Lovecraftian isn’t a bad choice, but drawing the threads a little more closely together could’ve helped a lot.