The Devils’s Harvest (2019) - Short Film
Written and directed by Robert Dee.
David struggles with his new identity as a father and begins to withdraw into the lonely comforts of drink. Late one night he is visited by a demonic entity from his childhood. An Old God of the forest, the entity has returned to exact a price for a long forgotten bargain. Before he has a chance to comprehend what is happening David is dragged back into his past where he must relive both the consequences of his devilish bargain and the repressed horrors of his own family.
Director Statement
The idea for The Devil's Harvest came from a desire to combine my love of folk horror with my fascination for the uncanny.
Freud describes the uncanny as a feeling. It is the unheimlich, the unhomely. It's an unsettling sense of psychological vertigo provoked by an encounter with people, places and things that are both familiar yet strange at the same time. The uncanny threatens the safe but fragile boundaries of our everyday world and, even more disturbingly, our very idea of ourselves...
So where do we find the uncanny? It's in the glass-eyed stares of lifelike dolls, the irrational fear of identical twins, the fever dreams of illness and the panic inducing sensation of deja vu. It occurs most often during traumatic moments or transitional life stages - when our sense of reality and self is shaken. At these moments we are vulnerable to what Freud called 'a return of the repressed' - where our old fears and desires, as well as our irrational childhood beliefs and superstitions can return.
Similarly, Folk Horror tells stories of a breakdown in the normal order of things. Often set in rural locations these films tell of a people isolated from the normal world, those untamed areas where the 'real' begins to unravel. Supernatural and dark libidinal forces rise from the earth, morality and rationality takes a back seat and The Old Gods return to feast on our desires...
The Devil's Harvest is a gripping and uncanny folk horror tale that gets under the skin and reminds us all that only a thin veil separates us from the lost playgrounds and deserted woodlands of our childhood.
