Desert Horror The Seeding Is a Seedling of an Idea
The Seeding reads like a film that exists because someone stumbled upon a gigantic hole in the Utah desert and thought, “What a sublime location for some horror stuff!” It is, mind you. Writer/director Barnaby Clay collaborates with cinematographer Robert Leitzell to illustrate sunburnt isolation in this thriller about a man stuck in a sunken pit, but the crisp camerawork is wasted on a frustrating script that tries so, so hard to keep our clueless protagonist in his well of misery. The corroded mineral walls, dehydrated trees, and all of nature’s other décor are wonderfully shot, and the performances aren’t to blame, but The Seeding just doesn’t have the storytelling mindset to protect its characters from looking like fools instead of victims of horrific circumstances.
Scott Haze stars as photographer Wyndham Stone, who’s out snapping shots of an eclipse in a nowhere stretch of dead desert. Wyndham is dressed in a button-down, more desk jobber than outdoorsman, which questions his survival instincts should he find himself astray. That exact predicament happens when Wyndham stumbles upon a lost boy, who leads him away from civilization and disappears. Wyndham spies a pioneer-looking shack at the bottom of a massive crater, so he climbs down a rickety iron ladder that connects to rope footholds, where he asks homeowner Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil) for a phone. She instead offers stew and a bed, but when Wyndham wakes up the following day, the rope ladder has disappeared—Alina doesn’t seem to think he’s going anywhere.
Clay’s inspiration for The Seeding is humbly personal: his son’s birth. The paranoias of pregnancies, parenthood and familial safety are like fresh wounds in a movie called “The Seeding” (those themes shouldn’t be a surprise). Wyndham encounters a gang of lost boys with leaders Corvus (Alex Montaldo) and Arvo (Michael Monsour), who torment the city slicker forced into Alina’s domestic bubble. Psychological and physical abuse become the norm as these adolescent vagrants dangle harnesses like carrots in front of Wyndham, cackling like wayward brothers out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. There’s something diabolical at play; Clay views the “cycle of life” in a barbaric and bloodthirsty manner.