Dark Harvest Ending Explained: Burn It All Down
There's a reason the young adult dystopia fad took off when it did in the 21st century. After a decade that saw the U.S. waging multiple wars overseas and a worldwide financial crisis, stories centering on oppressive, totalitarian governments and socioeconomic inequality very much spoke to the concerns of young people (or, really, anyone who was worried about where things were headed in the lead-up to our current hellscape). While Norman Patridge's 2006 novel "Dark Harvest" is a horror-fantasy rather than sci-fi and came out two years before the first "Hunger Games" book, it, too, was clearly informed by what was happening in the 2000s, particularly how the United States' "War on Terror" paralleled its approach to the Cold War and Vietnam back in the 1960s.
By comparison, director David Slade's "Dark Harvest" movie adaptation was late to the party when it finally came together, only to be bounced back multiple times as a result of COVID-19 before quietly being released on digital just in time for the 2023 scary season. It's also very much a triumph of style over substance (as /Film's Chris Evangelista observed in his review), although that style is pretty spectacular (make that spooktacular), as you'd expect from the stylist responsible for "Hard Candy," "30 Days of Night," and numerous episodes of "Hannibal." Nevertheless, if you dig beneath the film's Halloweenish imagery and general vibes, you'll quickly uncover some interesting commentary on the destructiveness of the U.S. war machine.
What you need to remember about the plot of Dark Harvest
"Dark Harvest" takes place in a small Midwestern town that seems unremarkable, save for a certain annual tradition. You see, every Halloween a supernatural force known as Sawtooth Jack takes the form of a Scarecrow in the town's cornfields and proceeds to try and attack the town's church. The only thing standing in his way are the town's teen boys, who are tasked with slaying him and then eating his innards (which are made of candy). Whoever delivers the killing blow is given a huge payout, a shiny car, and permitted to leave town to go wherever they want. So, naturally, a year after his sibling Jim (Britain Dalton) wins this "contest," Richie (Casey Likes) sees this as his chance to finally escape Jim's shadow ... even though the rules forbid the brothers of previous winners from competing.
The subtext in "Dark Harvest" rapidly becomes text (to paraphrase a famous "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" quote). Taking place in the early '60s, the film frequently reminds viewers of the era's prejudices and inequalities, be it through subtler means (like when we learn that only members of select classes are afforded the "privilege" of fighting Sawtooth) or explicitly through the character Kelly (E'myri Crutchfield), the rare Black girl in town and, as such, a giant bullseye for racist locals. Then there's the way teen boys are locked in their rooms and starved for days before Halloween night, so as to further bring out the violent, macho habits they're encouraged to embrace all year. And, of course, there's the Harvest Guild, the shadowy organization that insists Sawtooth is an unfeeling monster who must be stopped, lest he (literally) destroy the town's religious institution and cause a storm that ruins their annual crops.
What happened at the end of Dark Harvest?
Come Halloween night, Richie discovers the dark secret of ol' Sawtooth. It turns out that every year the boy who kills him is then hunted down and murdered by the town's vicious head of law enforcement, Officer Ricks (Luke Kirby), at which point their corpse is used to create the next Sawtooth scarecrow. This is also why the winners' brothers aren't allowed to try and slay him, as the Harvest Guild has deemed that families need only sacrifice one of their children to this arcane ritual to keep the town prosperous. However, this horrific cycle is disrupted when Richie and Kelly team up to stop Sawtooth, only for Richie to realize the creature has the same belt that Jim always wore. When Richie confronts his parents over this, his mother (Elizabeth Reaser) kills herself over the guilt that she feels, while his father (Jeremy Davies) insists they didn't learn the truth until it was too late for Jim.
Unfortunately, Richie isn't able to do anything for Sawtooth/Jim, either, and reluctantly slays him at his behest after he's mortally wounded. Upon subsequently trying to escape town with Kelly, Richie manages to get the drop on Ricks and shoot him only to be taken out by the farmer (an uncredited Jim Kirby) who assembles the Sawtooth scarecrow every year. Thanks to Richie's father, though, Kelly is able to get away for real, and the former returns a year later to kill the farmer and assist his transformed son. Their plan? As Richie's father puts it, "Burn it all down!"
What the end of Dark Harvest means
Remember what I mentioned earlier about the subtext in "Dark Harvest" becoming more or less actual text? That's very much the case with its ending, which reveals the town has been sacrificing and, in the case of the teen boys, literally eating their young to maintain their way of life. It doesn't require a leap so much as a short hop to read this as a metaphor for the way the U.S. fed its youth to the war machine in the '60s during the Vietnam War and then again in the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, all in the name of protecting our so-called great democracy from outside threats (threats that were both exaggerated and something that our government had a hand in making). And no, that previous reference to Hozier's "Eat Your Young" wasn't accidental, either.
In a broader sense, "Dark Harvest" also brings to mind Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery," another chilling parable about a sadistic social tradition that involves the sacrifice of an individual's life for, supposedly, the good of a community. But where Jackson's tale (as timely and disturbing as it ever was) has the benefit of not having to flesh out its small-town American backdrop in anything but the broadest of strokes, the film version of "Dark Harvest" struggles a bit when it comes to its world-building and making its own allegories work as a narrative. Still, with creepy atmosphere to spare and some underdeveloped yet intriguing ideas at play, this is one Halloween horror flick that's more treat than trick.