Toronto based scribe Calum Marsh has written an interesting article for Playboy about Australia’s current crop of quality horror films.
Mostly in response to Wolf Creek 2’s release in the States, the article is well worth the read.
In the mid-1970s, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett wrote a screenplay called Star Beast, a horror film about the crew of an interstellar spaceship terrorized by a deadly extraterrestrial.Alien, as the film eventually would be re-titled, was modeled after proto-slashers like Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, whose Grand Guignol carnage O’Bannon and Shusett had faithfully replicated. But what distinguished Alien from the glut of its genre’s contemporaries was the sense of isolation its cosmic setting inspired. Adrift in the infinite blankness of space, the film’s victims found themselves with nowhere to hide.
This proved a significant modification to the slasher formula. What’s more, it seems to have been a major influence on three decades of filmmakers in Australia, who have discovered that their homeland’s natural environment—miles upon miles of toast-dry sand plains and salt pans—afford them a similar appeal. As a result, the country has become a sort of hotbed for horror films in recent years, yielding some of the most acclaimed—and provocative—exponents of a genre not exactly known for pleasing critics. And so, the space-like isolation of the outback has birthed a genre unto itself, and for good reason. Horror writers are always conspiring to thwart escape: hence the locked door, the disconnected phone. But the Australian desert solved the problem of escaping for good, tapping into what made Alien so terrifying. After all, in the outback, no one can hear you scream.
It’s a simple gimmick, but a remarkably effective one. Consider its most recent application. Roughly 30 minutes into Greg McLean‘s new film Wolf Creek 2, Katarina (Shannon Ashlyn), a young German backpacker who has just witnessed her boyfriend’s decapitation, wriggles free of her makeshift bindings and flees from her would-be killer. This, you think, is precisely the sort of moment you’re always hoping for in a slasher film: The hero has quietly slipped away, narrowly avoiding inevitable torture and death, and all she needs to do now is run for safety. But there’s a problem: Katarina is in the Australian outback, and there’s nowhere safe to run; there’s only more desert. Not surprisingly then, the killer quickly finds her. Later, a British tourist named Paul (Ryan Corr) evades capture at the hands of the same maniac, taking flight across the arid flatlands in his overheated jeep. He, too, finds nothing. The void of the outback proves endless, and it isn’t long before Paul, bedraggled and parched, finds himself back within the sights of his pursuer.
Cinema Australia 