by John Rhall
Demonising the landscape
by
John Rhall
Copyright 2013 to John Rhall
Demonising the landscape:
A decade of Australian horror movies that may never occur again in quite the same way again.
Chapter 1
The role of the landscape in Australian feature films has been an integral part of our development as a nation and an indicator of our national identity (Rattigan 14). The earliest Australian horror movies, those that predate the period under investigation in this thesis, were, on the whole, cheaply crafted thriller/chillers that made little use of the landscape other than as a backdrop. It would be fair to say that prior to 1971 few local horror films capitalised on the landscape in order to add an extra dimension to their tales of fear and dread. This study examines a selection of Australian horror films made during a single decade 1971-1981 in order to identify the elements that demonised the rural landscape in the eye and mind of the spectator.
Horror films made in Australia in the period known as “the revival” (Dermody and Jacka 1: 48) were rarely described as belonging to the horror genre by those who analyse the Australian cinema. This was due in part to an ideological yearning to create an indigenous Australian genre, distinct from the Hollywood created genres (1: 48). Instead, they are more likely to be discussed as “Australian gothic” (2: 40) or even mystery/drama. In all too many cases the horror themed film as such is ignored altogether by many local critics and theorists alike. This attitude could be described as curious or even remiss considering the body of analytical works prompted by American horror films such as Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), Alien (1979), and others too numerous to mention in this brief essay. However, it is interesting to note that Robin Wood, an influential English film critic, discusses the value of horror film analysis as a part of cultural understandings, specifically exploring particular horror films in some detail for the insights they offer “into our culture” (Wood 202).
The role of the landscape in Australian feature films has been an integral part of our development as a nation and an indicator of our national identity (Rattigan 14). The earliest Australian horror movies, those that predate the period under investigation in this thesis, were, on the whole, cheaply crafted thriller/chillers that made little use of the landscape other than as a backdrop. Films such as The Strangler’s Grip (1912), and The Face at the Window (1919) were crafted along similar lines to much of the imported product, focussing on swooning heroines and cackling villains – they offered little by way of contemporary social comment (Pike and Cooper 31, 92-93). It would be fair to say that until 1971 few local horror films left a lasting impression of unease on the Australian public. However, the period from 1971 saw what was to become a regular flow of local horror films. A significant number of these films contained a thematic pattern that disrupted and subverted the prevailing ideals of rural Australian life by focusing on the supposed hidden horrors of a landscape that had never been pictured that way before.
The landmark output of some 51 Australian made films in 1911 shows overwhelmingly a bush/outback narrative or theme (Whitlam 1). To put this into perspective, in 1911 only one third of our fledging population lived in the cities and so our cultural identity was understandably reflected by filmmakers aiming their products to embrace those living outside the major cities. These early films, and many of those that came after, would occasionally depict the landscape as tough, even hostile, but rarely demonic (Gibson 173). The early Australian films such as On Our Selection (1920), The Overlanders (1946), etc, usually depicted a landscape as one open to possibilities, a landscape that was vast and imperious, or a landscape that was benign and empty (McFarlane 11-12). Dermody and Jacka claim that landscape has come to mean broader aspects of our culture, and the way in which the culture is read back into our landscape through film (2: 21). Certainly in most of the films concentrating on “bush values” and the outback “way of life”, particularly those classed as sentimental favourites, a particular view of our cultural landscape was in play as Brian McFarlane admits in most films “the landscape” was seen as a “repository” of Australian “values” and “challenges” (71). For example the film Sunday Too Far Away (1975) is described as scrutinising the Australian “bush ethos” in a manner where the “landscape here is not merely peaceful but empty and monotonous” (80).
It is not the intention of this discussion to engage in a debate over whether a film should best be described as gothic themed or horror themed, nor will it persist with the term “horror related”. Instead, all the films under discussion will be referred to as horror films; even while some quoted critics in this thesis will be seen to use the term “gothic” as freely as they use the term “horror”. In chapters 3-5 I will undertake an examination of those films that use a “cinema of realism” in order to challenge the dominant values of Australian society. The films Wake in Fright (1971) Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978). In chapters 6-8 the films that use the “cinema of fantasy” will be discussed. The films are The Cars that ate Paris (1974) and Mad Max 1 (1979) coupled with Mad Max 11 (1981). Chapter 9 will acknowledge the most recent Australian horror film to attract critical analysis, Wolf Creek (2005).
Chapter 2
The Mateship Myth
It is fair to say that these first horror films of the “new wave” sowed confusion among the public who viewed them, the critics who analysed them, and the funding bodies who financed some of them. Australian audiences were repelled by Wake in Fright, confused by The Cars that ate Paris, and determined to see Picnic at Hanging Rock as an art-house film, hailed for its beauty and pretty much ignored for its horror narrative. Dermody and Jacka describe Picnic at Hanging Rock as containing elements of “bush picturesque, Edwardiana, and horror” thus noting that there is a larger message than that afforded by a simple “art film” (2: 105). Brian McFarlane describes it as “visually arresting” (73) while P.P. McGuinness, writing for the National Times, saw an “extra dimension of horror” in Peter Weir’s period film (O’Regan 145). Even so, Picnic at Hanging Rock was rarely discussed in the context of the horror genre, with little argument forthcoming when Dermody and Jacka located it as belonging in the Australian indigenous fold, along with My Brilliant Career, Breaker Morant, and Newsfront (2: 145). The Australianisation of local film genres was an attempt to eschew American values and dominance of film type and the success of this movement can be seen at any large video-rental store – there is no such category as mystery/drama or gothic on display.
Ted Kotcheff, the Canadian director of Wake in Fright (1971), created a view of Australia and Australian life in the outback that stunned critics and the public alike (O’Regan 57). This film is arguably one of the first horror films that questioned the Australian landscape as anything but inanimate, pastoral, or mundane. Wake in Fright painted a horrific view of the outback and the characters who are almost condemned to inhabit it, and it is a film that could be said to have set the tone for many films that followed; ones that present dystopian views of “mateship” and “misogyny” (57). In Wake in Fright the themes of sexual repression, unthinking savagery, and intellectual stagnation are presented as a direct consequence of “living in the middle of nowhere” (Turner 42). In this film the outback Australian landscape is pictured as overtly hostile, something that needs to be controlled with a gun – the things that inhabit it to be shot or destroyed lest they destroy the outsider (43). Speaking of Wake in Fright, Tom O’Regan says it “introduced the idea of endemic and structural evil to Australian cinema” (57). Dermody and Jacka also claim that Wake in Fright “turned a deliberately blind or jaundiced eye towards the beauty of the
interior landscape; it was about the impoverished terrain of white, civilised humanity in that overwhelming emptiness” (2: 81).
Brian McFarlane makes a pointed recognition of horror in the landscape when he groups Wake in Fright (1971), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), and remarks that “they have created a powerful sense of the interaction of person and place”, which he says goes some way toward the “celebration of Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘sunburnt country’ image, with its sentimental tribute to the nation’s resilience in the face of ‘flood and fire and famine’, to visual exploration of the inherent contradictoriness of the place” (42). Ken Hall, claimed to be a producer of more Australian films than “any other living Australian” was said to have described Wake in Fright as a film that “should never have been made” (Thoms 54). It was not, according to Thoms, that the film was not well acted and well directed but that its very horror narrative would only appeal to “minority tastes” (54). It could be argued that Hall was right on one level, at the time of original release few people were attracted to this film, but as recently as July 2009 Wake in Fright had been re-released in Australian cinemas several decades after its original release. What the film Wake in Fright has to say about Australian myth and values seem hardly to have dated.
It can also be argued that in Wake in Fright the iconic representation of the Australian landscape has been altered drastically to one of an unfriendly at best and a fearsome one at worst significance. The poster for the film is emblazoned with this promising text “Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have a taste of dust and sweat, mate? There’s nothing else out here” (Pike and Cooper 259). In Wake in Fright the story of an ‘outback’ schoolteacher John Grant, caught between his desire to excel at his craft of teaching in a remote town of Australia and his desire to return to his girlfriend in the city by the sea (Sydney) presents the dichotomy of a person being out of place in a country they only think they understand (McFarlane 52). This ignorance of the reality of a life outside the protective embrace of a major metropolis can be seen when Grant makes the mistake of entering a game of chance that involves flipping two coins in the air and shouting heads or tails or neither before they land (two-up), in the fly-blown rough-and-tough pub of the mining town where he is contracted to teach. When Grant loses all his money it shows he has little knowledge of a game that can be manipulated against the player and, it could be said, he loses more than his ticket back to Sydney by his show of vulnerability in the pub (Turner 42). Clearly, Grant is marked as a loser early in the film, losing his money, his rail ticket, and most of his other possessions as the film progresses. The symbolism of Grant’s material losses also echoes his loss of “difference, privilege and privacy” (42) and Grant can now be seen as exposed to more than the withering glare of the cruel outback sun. When Grant makes the further mistake of sharing the rough company of those who have already succumbed to the torpor of this remote and inhospitable place, his troubles really begin.
Grant is shown in this film as a man who can’t fit in because of more than a simple failure of willpower. He can be viewed as a man repressed by all that civil society represses and because of that repression he is unable to summon the skills which may allow him to survive in this hostile, uncivilised, and ultimately barbaric place. The events of the film continue to test Grant, especially during a crude and cruel kangaroo hunt. This is a scene that shows Grant brought down to a level of savagery that stuns and frightens him in a sequence where “repression, violence and masculine ritual are suddenly on display in the most destabilising moment of the film” (Dermody and Jacka 2: 81). The blood-lust slaughter of this sequence of the film is in direct contrast to previous adopted strategies of Australian bush films that feature either humane slaughter of animals or avoid the scene altogether (Pike and Cooper 2-245). A further threat to the sanctity of the male body and hence the male ego is seen when Grant is sodomised by the drink addled Doc Tydon. This catastrophic fall from grace prompts Grant to attempt to thumb a ride to the city (Grant thinks of Sydney as the city, the truck driver doesn’t) only to end up right back where he started when the truck driver pulls up in the town that Grant has been trying to escape from. In desperation Grant shoots and wounds himself in a foiled suicide bid and when healed returns meekly to his teaching post at the outback school like a prisoner denied parole.
The depiction of this part of “the bush” of Australia horrified many of the critics who set out to deny that anything like this could be so. O’Regan described the characters depicted in this film as “vicious, nasty, racist, ugly, predatory people” and what he termed “Wake in Fright Monsters” (248). Indeed, as Brian McFarlane supports, the intention of this film was to do more than explore the myths of mateship, its purpose was to explode them and he further argues that Kotcheff’s film “has not been surpassed by any of the native forays into this field” (218). That this film is a powerful back-flip in the attitude previously taken to the Australian landscape is made all the more so by having been directed by a visiting Canadian; one who sensed something different in the air and effectively portrayed it on film. Wake in Fright is described by Neil Rattigan in Images of Australia as a “cinematic trip into hell” and argues that it “is a horror film, not within the traditional Hollywood genre this time, but in a uniquely Australian manner” (306). Rattigan also maintains Wake in Fright disturbed and thus disrupted the previously held belief in the myth of several cherished “cultural perceptions” suggesting “no other Australian film offers such a savage indictment of a great number of cherished cultural perceptions” (306).
The first of these cultural perceptions is the myth of mateship, assumed to be strong in the psyche of Australians and described by McFarlane as having been reinforced in films for decades (54). The mateship ideal is something that lies in a “blurred territory between myth and reality” (54) and “the single most defining mythic characteristic of Australians” (Rattigan 306). John Carroll, exploring Australian values in Intruders in the Bush, maintains that mateship is one of “three” key “influences” that formed Australian culture; the others being “Victorian middle-class values” and “twentieth century consumerism” (143). The local men, those who Grant is forced to reach some sort of an accommodation with in this film, could easily be described as anti-mates, much like anti-matter, if it comes into contact with normal matter (in this case Grant) there is a cataclysmic explosion. By casting Grant as an oppositional other the film explores and exposes the failure of the mateship myth to live up to the Australian dream. Wake in Fright aptly demonstrates the fragility of a surface friendship, and how it can quickly degenerate into open hostility at any sign of an individual’s refusal to conform. This is well illustrated in an exchange between Grant and a grizzled outback truck driver from whom Grant has thumbed a ride:
DRIVER: Come and have a drink, mate.
GRANT: No, thanks.
DRIVER: Come and have a drink.
GRANT: No…
DRIVER: It’ll only take a minute. Come on, come and have a drink with me.
GRANT: Look, mate, I’ve given up drinking for a while.
DRIVER: What’s wrong with you, you bastard? Why won’t you come and have a drink with me? I just brought you 50 miles and you won’t drink with me. What’s wrong with you?
GRANT: What’s the matter with you people, eh? You sponge on you, you burn your house down, murder your wife, rape your child. That’s all right. But not have a drink with you, a flaming, bloody drink, that’s a criminal offence, that’s the bloody end of the world.
DRIVER: You’re mad, you bastard! (Murray 73).
*******
While Scott Murray sees this exchange between Grant and the truck driver as a critique of what Grant himself sees as the empty rituals of mateship he also sees the driver’s explosive response to the refusal as indicative of a deeper and more troubling problem surfacing in the Australian mateship myth (73). This problem could be described as a �
�dark” intolerance caused by a prevailing sense of xenophobia, often kept hidden in civil society, but open to exposure in the forbidding landscape of a desolate outback (72). Neil Rattigan describes mateship as “probably the single most defining mythic characteristic of Australians” and argues that it can be seen as “based not upon genuine concern for another but upon an aggressive demand that common perceptions and common social activities be shared without question” (306). Rattigan maintains that the “ostracizing” of “outsiders” or anyone who deviates from group behaviour norms can be seen in other Australian bush narratives, and mentions Sunday Too Far Away (1975) as an example before concluding that Wake in Fright “differs” from most because of the “extremely distasteful way in which conformity is enforced” (306). Graeme Turner would seem to agree with Rattigan when he explores the drinking ritual of Australian mateship and notes how the required sharing of alcohol and “drunkenness” define the landscape in which Grant finds himself a prisoner of, and the inherent dangers contained in just such a landscape that he is too ignorant to recognise: “The remainder of the film exposes Grant to the rituals of initiation into the community” (42) Turner sees the “losses at the two-up game” along with the “need to depend on ‘mates’, the obligatory sharing of drink and drunkenness, the definitively male character of the world” closing in on Grant in a way that is “sinister and threatening (42). Turner further argues that until Grant accepts this ritual, as he does near the end of the film, without preconceptions or superior feelings, he will never understand that his “personal horizon” is completely reliant upon recognition of the “limitations of his context” (43). Grant is positioned, in a way that questions the societal values of the 70s to the audience at large. He is shown as a man out of his depth in what he naïvely believes to be a simple world, as the questioning of mateship and its values spills over into the repressed fear of latent homosexuality and the arms-length mentality of real men.
