Season 2 Episode 4: Grief, Cults and Videotapes in Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

It’s the late-1990s in the small town of Nevada, Iowa, when Jeremy, a worker at Video Hut, gets pulled into a strange and unnerving mystery after one of his customers tells him there’s something weird on one of the videotapes. Something that doesn’t belong. Two days later, another customer comes in with the same complaint. “There’s another movie on this tape,” she says.Jeremy soon finds, that yes, in the middle of Targets, an old movie with Boris Karloff, the movie is suddenly replaced with low res, black and white footage inside of a barn that looks nearly identical to one just outside of town…Who spliced the disturbing clips onto the tapes? And more importantly...why?John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester is a deeply unsettling and atmospheric exploration of grief, in this episode of Women are Reading.