The ending of Strange Harvest was about the police finally cornering Leslie Sykes, or Mr. Shiny, with the intention of bringing his decade-spanning murder spree to an end. Sykes began his bloody journey through California’s Inland Empire some time in the ‘90s. Joe Kirby and Lexi Taylor were the lead detectives on the case, and they were always a hundred steps behind Sykes. Things got so bad for them that, whenever Sykes seemingly took a big break from murdering random people in the most grotesque ways imaginable, the detectives just hoped that he had died of natural causes or given up. The closest they came to Sykes—not nabbing him, but just being in his vicinity—was when he went to the St. Bernadine Medical Center to kill one of his victims, Victoria, who had miraculously survived Sykes’ first attack on her. Some time after that, the detectives and the cops found Sykes’ storage unit, where there were references to Kaliban, Azragor, Ophiuchus, and more. In the time it took for them to figure out what Sykes was planning, he commenced the final phase of his plan, which involved killing a couple, Glenn and Stephanie Courtland, abducting their child, Sawyer, and taking him to San Bernardino National Forest, the same place where Sykes had started this whole journey. What was this plan? Did he execute it successfully? What was the meaning of that post-credits scene (yes, there is one)? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
What Was Sykes’ Plan?
So, Strange Harvest throws a lot of stuff at the wall in order to make Sykes’ plan feel complicated, most of which isn’t explained in detail. So, its relevance to the plot is a mystery. For example, there’s a lot of talk about the Shakespearean character called Caliban, whose name is spelt Kaliban in the film, but you don’t actually get to see a human-monster hybrid running around anywhere. From what I have learned, in The Tempest, Caliban was an island-bound monster whose mother was a witch named Sycorax. After his mother died and his home was invaded by Prospero, Caliban supposedly tried to rape his daughter, Miranda. In retaliation, Prospero enslaved Caliban and punished him brutally with the intent of making Caliban his follower. Caliban then turned to Stephano for help, but when he learned that Stephano wasn’t Prospero’s equal or superior to him, Caliban started treating Prospero as his god. I don’t know how that applies to Sykes’ saga. He’s clearly not referring to himself as Kaliban, right? He’s saying that the name of his god is Kaliban. So, maybe that god went through the same character arc as Shakespeare’s Caliban did, and since Sykes has read The Tempest, he dubbed his god “Kaliban.” Okay, after that, there are several mentions of Azragor, which seems to have its origins in the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a demonic deity that lives in some kind of a void—it doesn’t look anything like a giant leech though—and grants favors to anyone who partakes in insane levels of bloodshed and violence. We see Sykes killing people and draining their blood, and we also see his “god” emerging from what looks like an abyss in outer space; so, it makes sense that he calls this “thing” Azragor. There was mention of “Thorn of Time,” which was probably taken from a mobile game called Arena of Valor, but since there’s not much info on that and I don’t have the luxury to play it, I can’t do anything about it.
“The Shambler from the Stars” was supposedly a reference to the short story by Robert Bloch, which featured an intergalactic vampire that was summoned by the narrator of the story during his search for inspiration for a short story; yes, very meta. From this perspective, Sykes is clearly the narrator, probably searching for some kind of stimulus, and since the entity he’s summoning comes from outer space, he calls it a “shambler from the stars.” I didn’t get anything on the “Scriptures of Valeel” or “Drag aul”; feel free to educate me in the comments. As for Ophiuchus, yes, that’s the real deal. It is an actual constellation where it seems like a man is holding a snake. However, when it comes to Jupiter, Saturn, and Mercury forming some kind of a triangle with Earth in the middle every 800 years, thereby forming the triangular symbol that Sykes kept drawing, it’s questionable. There’s a rare phenomenon called “the great conjunction” where Jupiter and Saturn come really close to each other, but I don’t know about Mercury’s involvement in all this. Anyway, all this is to say that Sykes’ murder spree was part of his plan to summon an entity that was probably trapped somewhere in outer space as punishment for something it had done in its realm of origin to Earth so that it could satiate its bloodlust. Maybe there was some kind of a rip in the time-space continuum in the Joshua Tree National Park, which allowed this entity to communicate with Sykes and script its arrival on a planet teeming with life. In return, Sykes might have gotten some superpowers or just eternal life, while this entity turned humans into slaves or a three-course meal.
Did Sykes Actually Die?
In the ending of Strange Harvest, Sykes took Sawyer to a spot in the San Bernardino National Forest where he had erected a trio of triangular pyres to burn the baby. Police officer Pearce and his two colleagues, whilst responding to a 911 call, had arrived at that location to nab Sykes. But they got ambushed by Sykes. One of the officers got killed, one got injured, and Pearce was incapacitated. Sykes assumed that he was in the clear, and he proceeded to sacrifice Sawyer. He almost succeeded in his task because the aforementioned entity, Azragor, began to emerge from a portal in the sky and started triggering psychological and physiological reactions in anyone who looked at the phenomenon directly. However, Kirby and Lexi managed to locate the sacrificial altar, shoot Sykes, and save Sawyer. When they went to Pearce and his injured colleague to see if they were doing alright, Sykes seemingly vanished into thin air. Eventually, Sykes’ body was found in a creek, and his face had been disfigured by leeches—something that he had used on one of his victims, Dennis Zao, and the bite marks on him resembled the triangular symbol showcased throughout the movie—in such a way that it was difficult to identify him. Kirby said that forensics confirmed that it was actually Sykes’ dead body based on the fingerprints and DNA analysis. His body was cremated, but nobody came to claim his remains. That said, the police did receive a letter from Sykes, where he promised to restart his human-killing “harvest” and try to bring Azragor to Earth, probably 800 years from now, because that’s when our planet will be in the center of the triangle formed by Saturn, Jupiter, and Mercury. Given how the letter was postdated two days before his death, Lexi said that Sykes hadn’t risen from the dead to actually mail it. He must’ve anticipated his own passing and mailed that letter, which only reached the police after he had died, thereby creating this illusion that he was still alive. However, Kirby, Lexi, and everyone else who was affected by Sykes were sure that he was gone.
What do I think? I think Sykes is still alive. I mean, think about it. The case was going on for three goddamn decades, and that was making every law enforcement authority look insanely incompetent. Who’s to say that the police didn’t get some John Doe from the morgue and claim that that was Sykes so as to make themselves look good? Sure, the police had Sykes’ fingerprints, but his DNA? I don’t think the police had his or his family’s DNA. So, what did they compare the dead body’s DNA with? As far as I know, you need to have a criminal’s DNA, or their family’s DNA, already in your system so that once that criminal is nabbed, there’s something to compare their DNA with. If you don’t have any point of reference, how can you possibly identify somebody through their DNA? So, yeah, I don’t think Sykes is actually dead. Lexi and Kirby were sure that nothing supernatural was involved, but all the “found footage” showed that there was a lot of unexplained stuff centered around Sykes. If Azragor was impressed by Sykes’ work, maybe he kept him alive. Meanwhile, Kirby, Lexi, and the rest of the police department decided to give Sykes’ victims and the entirety of the Inland Empire some form of closure by stating that Sykes was dead. I mean, even if Sykes had transformed into some kind of immortal creature who would begin “harvesting” again for Azragor, since the next great conjunction would happen around 800 years from the present day, Sykes and his murder spree were technically somebody else’s jurisdiction. Hence, there was no harm in putting out a statement that Sykes was dead because, technically speaking, he would be inactive for the next few centuries.
Will Kirby Become The Next Mr. Shiny?
If you stuck around till the very end of Strange Harvest, you must’ve seen the post-credits scene where Kirby was hiking through the Joshua Tree National Park. He had marked several spots on his map, most of which were dead ends, because he was searching for caves. Before he headed to the Coxcomb Mountains, as his chances of finding these natural subterranean voids there were pretty high, the footage came to an end. So, we never got to know why he was doing what he was doing. Now, earlier in the film, Kirby and Lexi had interviewed Jared Kelly, a friend of Sykes’, who had said that Sykes was a fan of hiking and rock climbing. Apparently, during one of Sykes’ excursions, he had come across these red lights in a cave, which seemingly set him off on this murderous journey for the next three decades. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that Kirby was trying to locate those very caves. Why, though? I mean, everybody involved in the investigation clearly stated that there was nothing supernatural involved, that Sykes was a flesh-and-blood guy who was off his rocker, and that with Sykes’ death, the story had come to an end. Kirby found the Azragor stuff to be so preposterous that he refused to put it in his official report. Then why’s he searching for those caves and the red lights? Optimistically speaking, Kirby probably thinks that that’s a blind spot that they didn’t have the luxury of probing. Maybe he’s on vacation, or he has retired, and that’s why he just wants to make sure that their assumption that there was nothing supernatural about Sykes’ murder spree was accurate. The pessimistic side of me says that Kirby knows that Sykes’ master, Azragor, actually exists, and he wants to get a taste of the power that Sykes was trying to access.
The true-crime documentaries that this mockumentary is emulating obviously keep some facts out of the public eye. So, there’s a good chance that maybe Kirby didn’t tell the in-universe producers everything about what he had seen. Maybe he refrained from exposing certain details to everyone so that he could use that information to his benefit, submit to the will of an intergalactic deity, and turn himself into the next Mr. Shiny. At the same time, I am willing to give Kirby the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe he’s trying to close the portal through which Azragor communicates with earthlings and manipulates them into opening a portal in the sky for him. I don’t know how exactly he’s going to achieve that, because as soon as you look at the red lights that Azragor uses to communicate, you apparently become entranced or possessed. Maybe looking at it from afar won’t affect him. However, the uphill battle will begin after that, because he’ll need to convince someone to destroy those caves and the portal along with it. Or he’ll need to get the equipment to do it himself. Do I think that Azragor will allow Kirby to do that so easily? No, he’ll probably put up a decent fight. Remember all those humans who saw the portal and got sick? What are the odds that Azragor lives in their minds and he will puppeteer them to attack Kirby if he gets too close to them? I’d say pretty high. Of course, there’s no way to get the payoff to this post-credits scene unless writer-director Stuart Ortiz decides to make a sequel to this film. I don’t know what the budget of Strange Harvest was, but it did make a decent dent box office-wise. If it’s enough to warrant a follow-up, then I hope it’s a Kirby-centric story, not a tale sent 800 years into the future.
