Australian Horror

Wake in Fright

Celia

G’day, my spooky reader! We have finally arrived at October, my favorite month of the year, and it is already proving to be weird. Once again, I feel that the potential for spooky season fun is being eclipsed by a frustrating election cycle, and if you’re a curmudgeonly old school Austinite like myself, you’re just counting the days until ACL (and perhaps worse, F1) is over. My birthday is in October as well, and if I’m bitter about getting older it’s only because it’s getting increasingly hard to get a reservation at my favorite restaurants in this specific city, at this, particular time of year. I ask for so little in this life—a job that pays a living wage, a margarita on my birthday, and some scary movies to watch during spooky season—and yet all of these things are proving to be impossible thus far. While we technically kicked off the horror movie-watching extravaganza last week, I wanted to get into the mysterious October mood with some films from one of the most mysterious and dangerous places in the world: Australia. I’ve sampled a good number of flavors of horror from different countries on this blog—Italian horror, French horror, Spanish horror, German horror, Japanese horror, South Korean horror, even horror from outer space—but I’ve yet to take a trip down under to see what Australian horror has to offer. The mere idea of Australia honestly terrifies me. I vividly remember doing a research project on Australia in sixth grade, and learning that some of the most dangerous, poisonous, deadly spiders and bugs reside there. And the fact that so much of the continent is made up of the vast, mostly-uninhabitable desert known as the Outback is horrifying to me. And trust me, I’m used to the miserable temperatures of Texas, but I hear Australian heat is on a different level. Australia, itself, is very far away, from every continent. And once you’re there, it just seems too easy to be stranded somewhere desolate, dusty, and doomed by hazards. I am still very perplexed by Australia and Aussie culture, though. I don’t have time to name all of the iconic actors and performers that are from there, the list doesn’t even end with Nicole Kidman and Kangaroo Jack, but it’s a hot place that’s seemingly a hotbed for talent. I may never endure that 17-hour flight to Australia, but I have watched a good number of Australian horror movies already. There’s a fucked up little horror movie called Wolf Creek that I love, and I thoroughly enjoyed Talk To Me—which was the horror it-girl of 2022. In preparation for this double feature, I tried to watch as many Aussie horror films as I could, with quite bizarre results. I tried Richard Franklin’s Roadgames—a film who’s premise and poster is far more terrifying than its execution, though it was fun to watch truck-driver Stacy Keach banter with runaway hitchhiking heiress Jamie Lee Curtis. I also watched Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, a film where danger was constantly teased but simply never occurred. The best film that I watched was a 2011 found footage horror called The Tunnel, which offered a scathing critique of the Australian government along with genuine frights that could bring The Blair Witch Project to shame. Back in 2020, I watched an Australian mockumentary horror film called Lake Mungo that really disappointed me, and I also wasn’t the biggest fan of indie horror darling The Babadook. I detail all of this to convey just how much I have tried to find an Australian horror film that I like, because my reviews this evening could come off like a spoiled American horror-head who is hard to please. But I assure you that I tried, dear reader. A great deal of Australian horror is classified as Ozsploitation (which does not pertain to The Wizard of Oz) but is instead categorized as the explosive, cheaply-made, often-violent exploitation films made in Australia, especially in the 1970s and 80s. Tonight’s films represent both ends of the Australian horror spectrum, as I explored a tumultuously-chaotic existential nightmare and a heavily-symbolic arthouse familial drama. Let’s begin with a favorite of Ozsploitation, a 1971 film called Wake in Fright. Several Australian filmmakers tried and failed to adapt Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same name, but it was Ted Kotcheff who finally brought this harrowing tale to the big screen. We follow John Grant, a schoolteacher who works in a remote township called Tiboonda, that is so sparsely-inhabited that he seemingly teaches elementary to high school-aged students. It’s the beginning of their Christmas holiday—the hottest point of the year for Australia since they’re South of the equator—and John is overworked and underpaid in a stifling teaching contract. Thankfully, he plans to travel to Sydney to visit his girlfriend for the break, but he first has to make a pit stop in a small mining town called Bundanyabba. (Referred to by locals as “The Yabba”.) He departs from his dusty, desolate station at the small schoolhouse, and after surviving a rowdy train ride, John arrives in Bundanyabba. John is just there for the night, so after he grabs a hotel room, he grabs a drink at a crowded bar, and a cop chats him up. The cop not only encourages John to drink more beer, he insists upon it as he stares John down until he chugs every last drop of every last beer he buys him. John inquires about crime in this small, isolated town, and the cop says there’s very little crime, but they do get a few suicides every year—a semi-innocuous statement that eventually makes perfect sense. John is then dragged to the next reckless, toxically-masculine space, another bar where a simple but strange gambling game is taking place. The cop continues to buy John beer and steak, and introduces him to a man nicknamed “Doc” (Donald Pleasance), who is the next wacky small town Aussie to force John to drink. What begins as run-of-the-mill partying and debauchery turns into something so sinister and so sweaty that I could feel the heat coming off my screen. John desperately wants to get to Sydney, but after being peer pressured and guilted and fear-tactic-ed into drinking and gambling, he can no longer afford his plane ticket. Now completely broke and stranded and surrounded by the roughest crowd of men you’ve ever seen, the sweet, well-meaning John is taken down a treacherous road of pain and anxiety. Wake in Fright feels like a long, Australian episode of The Twilight Zone, for its surreal ability to create horror and paranoia out of relatively mundane places and things. To wake up in a strange, un-air-conditioned place where the only thing to drink is beer and the only way to entertain yourself is by shooting kangaroos, is a truly scary premise that the entire cast of this film sells. Wake in Fright has been referred to as “the first masterpiece of the revived Australian film industry” and with the amount of anxiety this movie gave me as I watched it, I can see why it’s made such an impact. Director Ted Kotcheff really plops you right into the center of this manly madness, and somehow makes you feel everything vividly—whether its the heat of this arid landscape, the smell of the thick cigarette smoke from a crowded but lonely bar, or the stress of our protagonist as he tries and fails to shrug off this small town’s hostile sense of hospitality. As an uncool girl who can’t hang because I hate the taste of beer, it was honestly hard to watch John ask for water, only for Donald Pleasance to say, “Water’s only for bathing, here’s a beer.” The sound design of this film is also terrifying—from the sound of the sweltering heat to the incessant noise of flies buzzing around these increasingly dirty men. And while this film is uniquely Australian, Wake in Fright captured that horrifying kind of existentialism that can come from living in any do-nothing small town in America, or anywhere. When the only entertainment is alcohol, the only pastime is bar-fighting, and each day only ever leads up to these activities, it is unbelievably depressing—and in Wake in Fright’s case—unbelievably frightening. And while I would’ve loved for this film to feature some more tangible, classic horror elements, ironically my least favorite part of the film is also the scariest part. This is a scene that garnered the most controversy, because it features actual, real-life kangaroo hunting—and I won’t go into any detail beyond that. Wake in Fright is a surprisingly tense and scary film for such a simple premise, but I do wonder how Australians feel about the way their country and stereotypes are used in film. Because every single Australian horror movie I’ve seen, really paints the locals as brutish and neanderthal-ish. I take no issue with Americans being depicted as dumb and spoiled, because, duh, but how do Australians feel about these one-dimensional portrayals? Perhaps they’re too proud of their lack of mass shootings down under to really care about how their filmmakers capture Australian men on film, but this pigeon-hole of patriarchal dumb-dumbs really stood out to me. What terrified me about Wake in Fright is what terrified me about my small, non-college town town where I attended university—and that’s a certain kind of desperate, dangerous, aggressive hedonism. Partying not to celebrate or kick back, but because there is a deadly boredom if you do nothing at all. Now that’s bleak. Speaking of bleak, let’s move on to tonight’s final film, a film that is even less of a horror film than Wake in Fright, but somehow managed to piss me off more. This is Ann Turner’s 1989 film Celia, which critic Kim Newman praises as "one of the great movies about the terrors, wonders and strangeness of childhood, and a still-undervalued classic of Australian cinema." And while I hate to add to the undervaluing of this film, I’m afraid that I must. Celia is set in 1950s suburban Melbourne, on the heels of WWII and just as the Red Scare landed down under. We are introduced to a young girl named Celia, just as she discovers the dead body of her grandmother. A sad but promising start to a film that I was told was horror. Things only get worse from here for young Celia, as she is picked on by the mean kids in school, and begins to have nightmares about a bushman boogeyman called the Hobyah’s coming to her window. It’s another Christmas break Australian film, as we see Celia eagerly exit school to go home, where she meets her new neighbors: the Tanners. Celia instantly becomes friends with the Tanners, and finds a special connection with their mom, Alice. It’s not that Celia’s own parents are bad, but they’re a bit close-minded and cold, when Celia is clearly yearning for the warmth and play that Alice has to offer. Now Celia finally has some friends to help protect her from the school bullies, who are still lurking and attacking Celia during the break. She’s constantly next door with the Tanners playing, sharing stories her grandma told her, and in general feels a sense of comfort there. But when Celia’s father learns that Alice was once in the Communist party, he forbids Celia from ever playing with the Tanners again. He even punctuates this command by finally buying Celia the bunny she desperately wanted, in exchange for her to never hang with the neighbors. All the while, the bullies are unrelenting, the police are paranoid about Russian spies, and Celia is just trying to have a good time with her bunny named Murgatroyd. Celia’s deep imagination and curiosity keep getting her into trouble, which, in the 1950s, means being spanked mercilessly. And while Celia has to resort to some devious activities to protect herself from her bullies—throwing rocks, witchcraft, the usual—but she always seemed justified in her actions to this critic. And when harm comes to her bunny Murgatroyd—again I refuse to go into detail—Celia is well within her right to turn violent, and she does! There was the potential for so much rich, creative horror in Celia, due to the childlike wonderment that is personified by corporeal monsters and realistic dream sequences, but it ultimately just disappointed me. Listen… I’m can get behind a familial, historical drama, but don’t call that horror unless it is actually horror. Don’t call metaphor and symbolism horror, don’t call allusions and implied what-ifs horror, if it is not actually horror. With all due respect to the good people down under, I think I am finally realizing that Australian horror is not for me. I really thought it was for me because I’ve been able to find a good amount of good horror from nearly every continent, plus I’m terrified of the idea of Australia, but I’m kind of like wtf, mate? And, this isn’t a problem specific to Australia, but can we please just stop referring to distressing familial dramas as “horror movies”? Please? At least The Babadook had the decency to hit us with some memorable jump scares amid its familial drama, but this didn’t have any of that. I know that I’m once again sounding like some kind of close-minded, jump-scare-dependent horror movie fan, but I’m really sick of how casually we throw the term for this genre around. Things can be horrifying and horrific without being horror movies. You ever try to watch Call Me By Your Name without crying? Now that’s horrifying. But horror, in its purest, simplest, most basic form is something more specific than just atmosphere, vibes, and implication. Well that’s enough shit-talkin’ for one blogpost, I gotta put another shrimp on the barbie and watch something actually scary now, but I do appreciate you reading along this week, mate. Not to sound like a kiwi, but that’s enough about Australia for now. Toodle-oo my didgeridoos!