David Slade’s Dark Harvest is a trick-or-treat Hunger Games with a pumpkinman full of candy and bloodlust

Dark Harvest as a film and a unit of entertainment is, sadly, as cursed wish-fulfilment as its own subject matter. The film, which began work in 2019 for a 2021 release, was shelved multiple times before finally being allowed out of its cell—with an unannounced one night theatrical release before being dumped directly to VOD.

For some of us who had long held out hope for this movie, the release forecast plenty about the quality we could expect. That said, it wouldn’t be the first time a studio had an all-timer horror property that they sat on because they didn’t know what to do with it. (Lookin’ at you, Trick-r-Treat.) This feature is probably not going to raise to that level, but if it finds any level of cult following, we can see why.

Dark Harvest is written by Michael Gilio, based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Norman Partridge. It focuses on the town of Bastion, IL in the 1960s, where Halloween night is not for trick-or-treating. Instead, it promises the annual return of Sawtooth Jack, a vicious slayer creature whose presence provokes a violent face-off against the town’s teen boys tasked with taking him down. If they fail, the harvest and the town are doomed. Whoever fells the evil pumpkinman gets a fancy brand new car and the rights to leave the city limits—meanwhile their family moves to a nicer part of town and joins the city’s leadership guild.

If it’s already starting to feel like too many ideas piled atop each other, we’re a long way from even establishing the other half of the rules this universe operates by. Basically you’ve got a Hunger Games/The Lottery competition to bring down a nightmare creature—that they surely wish they could’ve just called Pumpkinhead—with greasers running the streets in teenage gang warfare, but also some weird parent stuff and a heaping helping of racism, just in case you forgot that its also a period piece.

If there’s one thing we can love, despite many many faults, it is when a film tries to run with too many ideas instead of too few. It would be one thing to judge this by the measure of similar YA-adjacent affairs, wherein this was maybe using too much screentime world-building instead of exploring characters, knowing that there’s be more films to dive on further down the line, and good payoffs for the investment of lore backstory. Unfortunately, all of are leads and side characters are so interchangeable that these people don’t matter at all, and while those archetypes play out their fate we just keep piling other rules and backstory onto an already overflowing trashpile.

So why was anyone counting down the days to see this hit the street? The presence of director David Slade. Slade’s work in 30 Days of Night and Hard Candy are some of this generation’s most beautiful horror masterpieces, and his work in music videos, the TV show Black Mirror and Hannibal, and yes, a Twilight film, have proven his bona fides as a horror master. The idea of Slade-driven YA Midwest folklore horror with a pumpkin-murderer sounds like a match made in heaven. Sure enough, his visual talent for shooting even daylight scenes as if the sun is afraid to enter a room with our characters remains—anything dark can be made more gorgeously tinted and peak illumination is just an invitation for more blistering void. Some scenes and ideas transcend the film on vibes alone, and it’s hard to deny there’s real talent on display. Whether a victim of pandemic, timing, money, or all of the above, the result is simply not going to be worth it for most viewers.

If you want teen bloodbaths, there’s wetter geysers, and if you want scares there’s less confounding Halloweentown thrills. But for a very singular tone of Slade’s that we’d love to see more of, sooner rather than later, this is hopefully just a bump in the road.