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Scott Haze shines as a man who takes shelter with a mysterious woman in a tin shack at the bottom of a canyon

‘Never trust the surly feral kid” should be up there with “don’t have sex” and “ignore the late-night phone call” as crucial horror-movie life advice. That’s where hiker Wyndham (Scott Haze), out in the wilds photographing an eclipse, goes wrong in this horror-fringed thriller. Lured away from his car by Orion (Charlie Avink), who claims his parents have gone awol, Wyndham becomes lost and takes refuge in a tin shack at the bottom of a canyon. It’s inhabited by Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil), a blank young woman who offers him soup of dubious provenance.

The next morning, Alina is oddly nonplussed when the ladder leading back to the top has disappeared. They are both prisoners of a gang of demented youths who live in “the palace” up yonder,...

A half hour into Barnaby Clay’s debut narrative feature, “The Seeding,” Scott Haze drops to his knees and begs, “Will someone just tell me What is going on?” It’s an uncharacteristically funny beat coming from a character deadass named Wyndham Stone, a photographer who explicitly shops at Brooks Brothers and boasts all the personality of half-off wrinkle guard. But the unintentionally self-aware line is an early pop of entertainment in this otherwise maddening experiment in atmospheric dread. “What Is going on?” you’ll wonder ad nauseam — only to be forced-fed an answer less satisfying than a hunk of moldy bread. At least the table setting works.

Shot in a rust-red canyon in Utah, this meditation on domestic despair begins with an arresting image; a young child, no more than two-years-old, toddles through the desert alone munching on a human finger. It’s a stomach-churning cold open for the...

Writer-director Barnaby Clay, a longtime maker of documentaries and music videos, takes an artistic left turn into horror terrain with his feature narrative debut, The Seeding. The film finds Wyndham Stone (Scott Haze), after hiking through the desert and becoming lost, stumbling upon a house at the bottom of a large canyon hole occupied by the mysterious Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil). Naturally, things don’t go well for Wyndham once it’s clear that he’s trapped in the canyon and becomes the target of the desert inhabitants’ sadistic tricks and the nebulous motives of Alina herself, who keeps a strange relationship with the locals.

The film’s basic setup immediately recalls Woman in the Dunes, but Clay’s homages don’t end with the Teshigahara Hiroshi classic. With Wyndham being terrorized by malevolent hillbillies (shades of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and these tormenters’ vaguely Satanic rituals over a...