Australian Horror Now

By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

As a diverse and multicultural country, I would like to see us producing horror that represents the wide range of storytelling styles and lived experiences that come together to make this country what it is.”

–Isabel Peppard

“It was a difficult decision to make it even using Australian accents, because you get told ‘Australian movies don’t make money – why are you going to do it with Australian accents?’ We went down the path of doing it ‘Americanized’ and it just didn’t feel right to us for this movie.”

It’s April 2023 and I’m talking to Michael Phillipou and his twin brother Danny for an interview to feature in iconic American horror magazine Fangoria. We’re on Zoom; Danny’s somewhere in suburban Melbourne (he’s not sure exactly where), and Michael is in Thailand. They are still riding high on the jaw-dropping success of their debut feature Talk to Me (see top image) at Sundance in January which saw them promptly snapped up by indie film distribution kingmakers A24, a journey documented in an emotional video called “We Made a Horror Film” on their YouTube channel RackaRacka. But Talk to Me isn’t just any horror film: it’s a definitely, proudly Australian one.

With current box office takings at the time of writing clocking in at almost $45 million, Talk to Me‘s history-making arrival in American cinemas saw become A24’s highest grossing North American horror box office release ever. Breathlessly positive reviews poured out of seemingly every major publication, from The New York Times to the Hollywood Reporter, with the midnight screening at Sundance now achieving almost mythical proportions as industry players and critics whisper conspiratorially amongst each other “I was there”. With principal photography on a prequel already shot, Talk 2 Me is well on its way to completion. They have also been attached to Legendary Entertainment’s forthcoming Street Fighter film, with their already highly successful YouTube channel still sitting comfortably at just under seven million subscribers.

Awards season has yet to begin, but when it comes to horror at least, it’s reasonable to expect Talk to Me will make a significant splash. An early indicator is the film winning the audience award in August at Montreal’s Fantasia Fest, one of the world’s biggest and most influential genre film festivals. But the Philippou’s weren’t alone, with Cameron and Colin Cairnes – another pair of Australian horror movie-making brothers – coming second with a silver at Fantasia for their third horror feature, Late Night with the Devil. On the surface, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for an American film; starring David Dastmalchian as TV host Jack Delroy, while made in Melbourne the film’s accents alone gesture towards a US setting. While this makes it perhaps more accessible to non-Australian audiences, folks here back home know better: it’s almost impossible to watch Late Night with the Devil and not think of real life iconic Australian late night television legend Don Lane, a New York born TV presenter who became a late-night staple on Australian television from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s.

With Late Night with the Devil, then, the Cairnes brothers cleverly get to have their cake and eat it – they have made a distinctly Australian horror film, but one where using American accents doesn’t automatically equal selling out the Australian core of their project. This incredible interview where the real Don Lane confronts psychic sceptic James Randi made headline news in 1981 and gives a concrete glimpse into just how tightly tethered Late Night with the Devil is to its Australian context. With its world premiere at Austin’s SXSW in March 2023, the film counts amongst its fans horror icon Stephen King, who tweeted “It’s absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Your results may vary, as they say, but I urge you to watch it when you can”

With Talk to Me and Late Night with the Devil at the forefront, Australia has suddenly found itself in the midst of what looks like nothing less than a horror new wave. These films join an impressive number of other widely acclaimed titles making 2023 very much a bumper season for the genre’s antipodean output. At the Melbourne International Film Festival in August, this critical mass became hard for even Australia’s notoriously genre-shy mainstream media to ignore, the trend receiving coverage on television and in mainstream newspapers. Alongside Talk to Me packing out suburban multiplexes, MIFF’s programme included a wealth of Australian indie horror, amongst them a scifi-horror hybrid about a disgraced podcaster (Matt Vesely’s Monolith), a taut chamber piece which pits a mysterious young woman against an even more mysterious older man (Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen’s You’ll Never Find Me), a portrait of young Australian masculinity run amok at a buck’s party gone wrong (Jim Weir and Jack Clark’s Birdeater), and a possession movie based on a true story that brings a humane, compassionate heart to the real horrors that lie at the core of the DIY exorcism industry (Nick Kozakis’s Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism).

Like both Talk to Me and Late Night with the Devil, the bulk of these films had already made a significant international splash before local audiences could see them. With only one location and one actor – Evil Dead Rise’s Lily Sullivan – Monolith screened at SXSW alongside both Talk to Me and Late Night with the Devil, marking a significant Australian contingent at this year’s Austin-based event. Monolith just played to adoring crowds at London’s FrightFest where Sullivan won the Best Actress award, with both Monolith and Late Night with the Devil on the programme for the forthcoming Sitges Film Festival in Spain this coming October. You’ll Never Find Me had its world premiere at Tribeca earlier this year, another microbudget horror film that currently sits on a flawless 100% fresh rating on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes which has just been announced on the program for Austin’s Fantastic Fest. Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism had its Australian premiere at MIFF on the back of an already successful release in the US where it was picked up by distributor XYZ and received rave reviews at its world premiere at New Orleans’s Overlook Film Festival (amongst its vocal admirers were Fangoria editor Phil Nobile Jr.). And while Birdeater has at the time of writing yet to play internationally, there is already significant buzz beyond Australia following the film’s world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival where it won the audience award for Best Australian Narrative Feature.

If you weren’t paying attention, you could be forgiven for thinking that this new wave has appeared from nowhere – but, of course, you’d be wrong. But again, it is not unusual for overseas festivals to click with Australian horror movies before audiences at home do. Movies like Joseph Sims-Dennett’s Observance (2015) and Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas (2016) both played at the London Film Festival but received comparatively much less attention at home, and alongside the huge international success of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) we find ourselves very much in the terrain of the notorious so-called Australian “tall poppy” syndrome, where success is like a red flag to a bull, demanding a metaphorical cutting down to size of anyone who dare accomplish something. Kent’s film is a case in point that demonstrates only too vividly that Australians are broadly notoriously disinterested in locally produced horror (and cinema in general) until it succeeds overseas. The Babadook initially opened in Australia on a feeble 13 screens with virtually no fanfare whatsoever, and it was only when it became a hit overseas that audiences back home were able to “discover” it (in comparison, it opened in the UK on 147 screens). That Australian horror filmmakers seem to look to overseas festivals and markets as a default now is sad, but in this context surely not altogether unexpected.

Alongside the huge international success of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) we find ourselves very much in the terrain of the notorious so-called Australian “tall poppy” syndrome, where success is like a red flag to a bull, demanding a metaphorical cutting down to size of anyone who dare accomplish something.”

But even last year there were indications that Australian horror was on the rise, with Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes’s Sissy and Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone premiering at SXSW and Sundance respectively. And there are other kinds of Australian horror movies as well – Sean Lahiff’s Carnifex, Josh Morris’s Bliss of Evil, Jack Dignan’s Puzzle Box, and Sam Curtain’s Beaten to Death are but a few of the low budget horror efforts likewise popping off on the international genre festival circuit in the last year or so. There’s enough action in the Australian horror space to start making some important observations; for starters, except perhaps for revered genre elders Cam and Colin Cairnes, this new wave of Australian filmmakers are all mostly under forty – the genre is literally bringing new blood into the national cinema conversation, frequently without any support from the major funding bodies and screen industry institutions upon which more palatable mainstream fare depends. And despite previous hagiographies of Australian genre film saturating dominant histories with white male directors, Australian horror now is also a refreshingly diverse terrain. The 2019 horror anthology Dark Place by First Nations Australian filmmakers continued a tradition started by earlier pioneers like Tracey Moffatt’s BeDevil (1993) and Warwick Thornton’s Darkside (2013). The Dark Place segment “Scout” by Kodie Bedford is a standout – Bedford herself has since become established as one of Australia’s most exciting screenwriting talents – and Bjorn Stewart’s segment “Killer Native” was announced in 2020 to be in development as a feature called Invasion of the Killer Natives.

Bringing her distinctive queer punk underground aesthetic to genre filmmaking, 19-year-old transgender filmmaker Alice Maio MacKay is a walking Australian horror success story. Her first feature So Vam (2021) was picked up by international horror streaming service Shudder, North American company Dark Star Pictures acquired her second feature Bad Girl Boogie (2022) for distribution, while her third feature T Blockers recently received an Emerging Talent award at LA’s prestigious Outfest. Although her films have received a warm reception elsewhere – including Fantasia Fest in Montreal and London’s FrightFest – that the United States in particular has embraced Alice’s already impressive body of work comes as little surprise, to her at least. “Storytelling in horror speaks through visceral imagery and this alone is powerful – with the potential to span countries and cultures”, she recently told me. “I also think a lot of Australian horror is very bold, direct and honest, and really leans into the tropes of the genre. Perhaps this really resonates with many Americans, especially in today’s climate.”

Melbourne-based filmmaker Caitlin Koller shares a similar vision of a productive cultural intersection between the US and Australia in particular when it comes to horror. On the back of her early short, the festival favourite Maid of Horror (2013), Koller made her feature film directorial debut on the US indie horror-comedy 30 Miles from Nowhere in 2018 and is currently hard at work on her next feature. “A lot of Australian filmmakers grew up on American horror films, myself included”, Koller says. “Filtering familiar themes and stories through an Australian lens and refracting it back to an American audience makes our work feel accessible but also fresh enough to keep audiences interested without the barrier of feeling too foreign”. She continues, “On the 30 Miles from Nowhere set, the cast and crew always got my filmic references and we bonded over a sense of dark humour. But we also found joy in the different ways we saw the world or expressed our ideas, based on our geographical location.”

While the current wave of Australian indie horror speaks of a kind of exciting urgency linked to the present moment, a bigger picture doesn’t just allow us to bring in what has been happening in the genre space here over the past couple of years, but also demands a looking ahead to the future. After a number of earlier shorts like including Liz Drives (2017) and Maggie May (2018) turned heads on the international genre fest circuit, Mia-Kate Russell is now casting her debut feature, the revenge action/thriller/horror hybrid Penny Lane is Dead, while her fellow Melbourne women horror filmmakers – Isabel Peppard and Donna McRae – are both currently at different stages on their next horror features. Amongst these filmmakers alone we have visible proof that Australian women’s accomplishments in horror in particular do not end with the international recognition that Kent has received for her work, as well as other women like Natalie Erika James who made Relic (2020) and, more recently, Daina Reid’s Run Rabbit Run (2023). Working with GoodThing Productions (whose previous films include Justin Kurzel’s 2021 film Nitram), Peppard will be following up her award-winning 2012 animated short Butterflies with the tentatively titled feminist horror/gothic fantasy feature Motherless, currently in development. Reflecting on the current climate, Peppard notes, “Australian horror has always punched above its weight in terms of international audience but in some circles, horror can still be seen as a dirty word and tends to be regarded as low-brow or less worthy or sophisticated than other genres”. She continues, “When local work is successful on the international stage, it can remind people of the legitimacy, audience and reach that horror has and help to open doors for other filmmakers trying to get their works off the ground.”

Donna McRae agrees, and is similarly optimistic. Another award-winning Australian filmmaker, McRae has excelled in horror in particular with earlier indie features including Johnny Ghost (2011) and Lost Gully Road (2017), with her highly anticipated third horror feature Dawn now in production. “It feels like a very exciting time – and that the door has opened a little further for us”, she says. “Audiences seem to have warmed to the fact that we make very good horror films here and they can actually be proud of them.” She continues, “I think they have been taken a little more seriously – no longer in the low art realm, but perhaps, because of the success of Talk to Me and the long line of wonderful horror films before it, that horror is now something to embrace – on so many levels; the way horror can explore social issues, the way it can be inventive, the way it can entertain, and the way it can be financially viable.”

But when asking those three big, intertwined questions – why horror, why Australia, and why now? – time and again, the answers frequently involve Covid. While Australia largely avoided the high death rates during the first two years of the pandemic that were recorded elsewhere, this was the result of what were in some regions extremely harsh and lengthy lockdown restrictions. You’ll Never Find Me co-director Indianna Bell spoke precisely of this during a Q+A for the film at a recent Melbourne International Film Festival screening:

Covid happened, and basically people had to get really creative about how they could keep making films under really tight restrictions. How do you keep a film being contained with minimal crew, and fly under the radar and keep going? That naturally led to a lot of low budget horror being made, because horror is one of those genres that work really well with a low budget. You can get a camera and you can shoot into the corner of a room and make it really dark and have some sort of creepy sound, and that’s sometimes more effective than a $70,000 animatronic monster suit. You can get away with a lot in horror.

The genre’s unique potential for filmmakers without a lot money but with a lot of ideas is something that McRae strongly echoes. “I think that filmmakers have become aware that the horror genre embraces inventiveness, very low budgets, unknown cast, and is cheaper to make which makes it attractive to work in”.  She continues, “It’s a very exciting time and I hope that our audiences get behind it – that will help immensely to keep the momentum going.” Peppard adds to this, reflecting on the enormously positive ways A24’s distribution of Talk to Me may potentially reverberate through the local industry. “Distributors like A24 have really helped prove that there is a market for bold and original content that doesn’t just pander to pre-existing tropes, but rather goes to unusual places and expands the genre,” she says. “As a diverse and multicultural country, I would like to see us producing horror that represents the wide range of storytelling styles and lived experiences that come together to make this country what it is.”

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.