Intensity 🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Barnaby Clay
The slow-burn folkloric feature The Seeding follows an oblivious photographer who gets trapped in the bottom of a desert crater, whose only inhabitant is a lovely young woman and a pack of nasty feral boys preventing his escape. What do they want? What does SHE want? The photographer is about to find out, and it’s not going to be pretty.
The Seeding feels like a modern fairy tale, where bad things happen to well-intentioned travelers in the wilderness. This movie was part of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival’s (BiFan) Bucheon Choice Selections, one of the competitive slates of films at BiFan. This movie offered up a slow-burn horror offering, featuring a photographer who gets lost and trapped in a desert crater with a single house in the center, where a mysterious young woman resides.
Be careful what you ask for because that oasis might be a lethal mirage.
Wyndham Stone (Scott Haze) is a photographer who has taken a trip out into the desert to capture the beauty of a solar eclipse. The beauty of the remote location is a dramatic place to get the perfect shot, but he will eventually regret the decision to trek out into the inhospitable conditions of the rocky desert.
After the eclipse completes its path, he wanders out a bit to enjoy the landscape and stumbles across a tween boy who tearfully claims to have lost his parents. Wyndham offers to help the boy, but the boy runs out ahead, in a winding chase to keep up. He loses the boy and subsequently loses his bearings, forcing him to hide under a rock ledge for shelter from the desert heat and then the nighttime cold.
After some fitful sleeping, he strikes out in the night for his way back to the car when he discovers a crater. At the bottom of the crater is an old house located in the middle of the floor of the canyon. He finds a steel ladder in the face of the crater cliff face. Wyndham discovers a second transfer chain ladder to get to the valley floor below. He stumbles into the house and finds it occupied by a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil), who is in simple anachronistic dress, and when Wyndham requests help, she offers him dinner and a place to rest for the night. Wyndham accepts some water, and after a brief respite, announces he needs to get back home and but when he steps outside the chain ladder has gone missing. The woman claims that happens sometimes. But it might be back in the morning.
The ladder remains missing, come morning. Adding to the mystery, Wyndham spots a series of cliff paintings, which depict pagan rituals with what appear to be serpent women and severed heads. He takes some pictures, and this of course sets off all sorts of warnings to the audience. Wyndham, after some initial curiosity, decides that his best chance is to scale his way out of the crater. As Wyndham climbs up, somebody chucks a chicken at him. He subsequently loses his grip, wounding himself badly from the fall.
There, at the rim of the canyon is the boy who he followed. And with that boy is a pack of feral boys of various ages, all of them wicked little savages. Have they been keeping the woman imprisoned down here? The woman seems unconcerned with their situation. Wyndham loses his patience but is too hurt to attempt another escape. Observing from the rim, the feral boys will undoubtedly try and stop him. The woman tends to his wounds but remains tight-lipped and unresponsive when discussing their predicament.
Clearly, he is now a prisoner. But why? And by whom? Is this a Lord of the Flies scenario? Wrong place, wrong time? Or a Hansel and Gretel scenario? (With a quietly seductive young woman in place of gingerbread and candy) Or is this a cannibal cult?
A lot of ideas ran through my mind as I watched this. Clearly, this protagonist isn’t as bright as your average audience member. Clear and obvious threats that we can see, he doesn’t pick up on until too late. Yes, we have the advantage of knowing that this is a horror movie going in, so we are naturally suspicious. Wyndham, however, remains ignorant of his predicament. He misses every potential threat we can see coming.
As a cinematic tactic, this works very well to build tension. We know if a situation seems too good to be true, it probably is. Wyndham has massive blind spots for his situation. There are so many times when I was saying “Dude… don’t…” and he does it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is a flaw in the plot, because it certainly amps up the anxiety quite effectively.
The end of the movie is simple, powerful, and consistent with the theme. Fateful choices are made, and bad ones at that. The movie executes it well. But again, a more resourceful and careful protagonist would not be in the fate that is the third act. Wyndham is the anti-Mary Sue. He is a man ill-equipped for his situation. On the other hand, Alina is a wonderfully ambiguous figure. She seems to be unfazed by the situation and is curious about Wyndham and his modernity. Also… this is not her first rodeo. The juxtaposition of the twitchy and impulsive Wyndham with the stoic and calm presence of Alina is an effective contrast.
Barnaby Clay has tapped into our primal hard-wired understanding of folkloric stories like this. Wyndham is the callow protagonist who ignores or is oblivious to all the sage advice that has become so second nature to us. Don’t wander off the beaten path. Always know where you parked the car. Don’t trust teenage kids with crocodile tears. Let somebody know where you are going if you leave for a trip in the wilderness. When you see ritual sacrifice murals, come up with a contingency plan! And, though the audience has enough foreshadowing to know better, the story is still even a half-step ahead of us. Even as we recognize Wyndham’s own folly the plot has some narrative secrets left. I half suspected the ending that came, but there were always two or three branches that I could have imagined happening as well.
This appears to be Barnaby Clay’s feature film debut. He has had a long track record of Music Videos for the likes of Rhianna, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and Take That. Making the jump to narrative features can be tricky for video directors. What stands out in this film is the editing and shot-making that call back to his video directing. The opening eclipse scene is particularly compelling. Clay also captures the natural beauty of the Utah desert wonderfully.
Some of the narrative connective tissue is missing though. The BiFan introduction for the film described Wyndham losing his car. A scene appears to be missing that would provide but that would have helped some of the logistical shortcomings of the film. The murals being of apparently little interest to Wyndham was curious too. That would have been RED FLAG #1 in my perspective. For something so evocative, it really came and went without any resolution other than providing a bit of foreshadowing.
Overall, this is a solid slow-burn thriller, with a thematically resonant conclusion. Haze and Sheil are compelling leads, but the supporting feral boys are a bit roughly portrayed… if they were old enough to have mustaches they would be twirling them. There are three or four big wow moments that grab your attention, but you will need patience with this film. For those who love folkloric horror, this is a recommended watch.
This movie is not rated, but it would certainly receive an R if it went through the MPAA for violence, nudity, language, and sexual situations. It is not a particularly gory movie, but it has some intense scenes of cruelty. The Seeding debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival prior to BiFan. The film will continue on the festival circuit for a while longer. XYZ Films is distributing this film, which bodes well for its future availability.
Scott Haze is in a bit of a pickle in The Seeding (2023)