Strange Country

Three schoolgirls and their maths teacher walk up a rock on Valentine's Day, 1900, and never come back down. It never happened. Australia decided to remember it anyway. This episode: Joan Lindsay, the woman who stopped clocks, and the novel she dreamed in two weeks. How Peter Weir and a $100 option turned it into the most acclaimed Australian film ever made, with bridal veil on the lens and an ear...

New Zealand horror did not start with Peter Jackson. In 1984 a gory little film about mutants on an island won the grand prize at a Paris festival of fantastic cinema, with Alejandro Jodorowsky heading the jury. It was called Death Warmed Up. It came out three years before Bad Taste. This episode goes back to the country before the rupture. A small, broke, isolated film culture that made only five...

Some films are about monsters. This one's about the people mad enough to build them. At this year's Sydney Film Festival, Mat sat down with the three filmmakers behind two films that look, on the surface, like a joke, and turn out to be about the same thing. The absurd, beautiful cost of making genre cinema the world has already decided is rubbish. First, Mockbuster, Anthony Frith's documentary ab...

The Exploitation Years In 1981, the Australian government introduced a tax rule called Division 10BA, and accidentally funded the most prolific horror decade this country has ever produced. The deal was simple: put money into an Australian film, write off 150% against your tax. Which meant a film could be a complete disaster and you'd still come out ahead. The worse the film, in a sense, the bette...

July 2023. Two brothers from Brisbane who used to throw each other off things on YouTube made a horror film for four and a half million dollars. It made ninety-two million at the box office. Something had changed. Episode 3 of Strange Country covers the last ten years of ANZ horror — and asks what shifted. The first wave pointed outward, at the landscape, at the vastness. The new wave has turned i...

In 1983, a nineteen-year-old in Pukerua Bay pointed a camera at his friends and started shooting. He had no money, no film school, and no crew. Four years later, Bad Taste existed. Episode 2 of Strange Country goes to New Zealand — to the backyard where Peter Jackson invented himself as a filmmaker, and to the question that's been nagging at the edges of this show since Episode 1. Everyone assumes...

Seventy percent of Australia is essentially uninhabitable. Not difficult. Not challenging. Uninhabitable. In the first episode of Strange Country, we look at the films that built Australian horror's most enduring obsession: the landscape as antagonist. Long Weekend (1978), Wolf Creek (2005), and Razorback (1984) are three very different films made across three decades — but they're all circling th...