Horror movies, Australian edition
Feb. 9th, 2026 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterIt feels strangely awkward watching movies about people who talk and behave like me! I know I’m not alone in that; Australian cultural cringe is a well studied phenomenon, and we don't exactly have a local equivalent of Hollywood churning out all-Aussie blockbusters on a regular schedule. When I think of Australian cinema, I think of boring arts grant dramas that no one wants to watch and culturally hyperspecific comedy that we don't want anyone else to watch lest the world know us for the bunch of dags we really are. Fun, tropey genre films are supposed to be about Special Fake Movie People with accents I've never heard in person and manners that are upside down from mine.
And yet, as I'm learning through my local library's streaming service, there's some really good Australian horror out there. I couldn't tell you exactly where to find these overseas, but at least some of them appear to have had international releases, so for all I know, they're on Netflix for you guys. I'd be so thrilled to hear what people without my cultural biases think. :D
The Tunnel (2011): This is a mockumentary about a news crew who fall foul of a mysterious subterranean killer while investigating a lead related to Sydney's network of abandoned train tunnels. The tunnels are real, and I vaguely remember hearing spooky rumours about them during the early 2010s, which I'm now thinking may have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for this film, lol. Anyway, this one scared the everloving shit out of me. The vibes are fantastic, the mockumentary gimmick is executed flawlessly, and most of all everything was just so familiar. I used to get everywhere I ever needed to go on those exact Sydney trains. The characters are completely normal, relatable Aussies of the kind you could meet everyday on the street. The actual plot is a bit thin but I was happy to overlook the silly bits because it was just such a damn enjoyable viewing experience. And the monster was SO FUCKING CREEPY. Pick this one if you like mockumentaries and/or wish to know more about ya girl from dreamwidth's old commute.
Relic (2020): A mother and daughter drive out to a small town in rural Victoria to check on grandma, whose neighbours haven't seen her in days. She is missing when they arrive, but reappears in the house days later, unwilling or unable to explain where she's been. Her stately country house is covered in what looks like black mould and there's a terrible black bruise on her chest. This is a heartwrenching film about the grief of losing an elderly parent to dementia, and also a fantastic haunted house story full of dark family secrets, unanswered questions and unexplained paranormal phenomena. The creaky old house and the damp, miserable evergreen forest surrounding it threw me back to the days of visiting my own grandparents. It really does capture the highly specific atmosphere of a certain kind of well-off but precipitously ageing rural town in southeastern Australia; I swear I could almost taste the air. For whatever it's worth, the Russo brothers are credited as executive producers; I don't know much about movie production and have honestly never been sure what kind of role an executive producer plays, but hey, those were two names I recognised. Take or leave the name recognition, though - I loved this movie either way.
Talk To Me (2022): A group of South Australian teens acquire an embalmed hand that lets them summon dead souls to temporarily possess them. But one of their séance parties goes too far, and a malevolent spirit decides it doesn't want to leave. This is a mix of paranormal and psychological horror that's as much about grief (the protagonist lost her mother to a very obvious suicide that her dad won’t admit to her was suicide) as about bloodthirsty ghosts. I am not sure why reviewers chose to bill a movie this thoroughly depressing as "fun" - it was fun at the start, sure, but by the end it had descended to a truly tragic place. I liked it a lot! But it definitely belongs on the downer end of the mood spectrum.
You'll Never Find Me (2023): In an isolated trailer park in the middle of the night, a young woman knocks on an older man's door to beg shelter from a violent thunderstorm. The woman is desperate, drenched, and seems unable to get her story straight about how she got there or where she came from; the man is withdrawn and antisocial and was drinking alone before the woman arrived. They both seem frightened of each other. Something about the situation is unmistakably off, but what it is exactly, the film plays close to its chest for the first exquisitely slow hour. This is a quiet, cagey movie that ratchets up the tension through unnerving not-quite-normal dialogue and uncomfortable just-barely-off-centre close-ups so that when things finally start going overtly wrong at around the hour mark, it feels almost like a relief - pain is easier to bear than the anticipation of it. I don't often enjoy trippy, "what the fuck is happening here" type stories and I REALLY don't often enjoy stories that end in the particular kind of twist this one used, but in this case I was absolutely sold on everything. Brilliant movie. Raised my blood pressure so high I had to flop on the couch and just breathe for like half an hour afterwards. No notes.
And yet, as I'm learning through my local library's streaming service, there's some really good Australian horror out there. I couldn't tell you exactly where to find these overseas, but at least some of them appear to have had international releases, so for all I know, they're on Netflix for you guys. I'd be so thrilled to hear what people without my cultural biases think. :D
The Tunnel (2011): This is a mockumentary about a news crew who fall foul of a mysterious subterranean killer while investigating a lead related to Sydney's network of abandoned train tunnels. The tunnels are real, and I vaguely remember hearing spooky rumours about them during the early 2010s, which I'm now thinking may have been part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for this film, lol. Anyway, this one scared the everloving shit out of me. The vibes are fantastic, the mockumentary gimmick is executed flawlessly, and most of all everything was just so familiar. I used to get everywhere I ever needed to go on those exact Sydney trains. The characters are completely normal, relatable Aussies of the kind you could meet everyday on the street. The actual plot is a bit thin but I was happy to overlook the silly bits because it was just such a damn enjoyable viewing experience. And the monster was SO FUCKING CREEPY. Pick this one if you like mockumentaries and/or wish to know more about ya girl from dreamwidth's old commute.
Relic (2020): A mother and daughter drive out to a small town in rural Victoria to check on grandma, whose neighbours haven't seen her in days. She is missing when they arrive, but reappears in the house days later, unwilling or unable to explain where she's been. Her stately country house is covered in what looks like black mould and there's a terrible black bruise on her chest. This is a heartwrenching film about the grief of losing an elderly parent to dementia, and also a fantastic haunted house story full of dark family secrets, unanswered questions and unexplained paranormal phenomena. The creaky old house and the damp, miserable evergreen forest surrounding it threw me back to the days of visiting my own grandparents. It really does capture the highly specific atmosphere of a certain kind of well-off but precipitously ageing rural town in southeastern Australia; I swear I could almost taste the air. For whatever it's worth, the Russo brothers are credited as executive producers; I don't know much about movie production and have honestly never been sure what kind of role an executive producer plays, but hey, those were two names I recognised. Take or leave the name recognition, though - I loved this movie either way.
Talk To Me (2022): A group of South Australian teens acquire an embalmed hand that lets them summon dead souls to temporarily possess them. But one of their séance parties goes too far, and a malevolent spirit decides it doesn't want to leave. This is a mix of paranormal and psychological horror that's as much about grief (the protagonist lost her mother to a very obvious suicide that her dad won’t admit to her was suicide) as about bloodthirsty ghosts. I am not sure why reviewers chose to bill a movie this thoroughly depressing as "fun" - it was fun at the start, sure, but by the end it had descended to a truly tragic place. I liked it a lot! But it definitely belongs on the downer end of the mood spectrum.
You'll Never Find Me (2023): In an isolated trailer park in the middle of the night, a young woman knocks on an older man's door to beg shelter from a violent thunderstorm. The woman is desperate, drenched, and seems unable to get her story straight about how she got there or where she came from; the man is withdrawn and antisocial and was drinking alone before the woman arrived. They both seem frightened of each other. Something about the situation is unmistakably off, but what it is exactly, the film plays close to its chest for the first exquisitely slow hour. This is a quiet, cagey movie that ratchets up the tension through unnerving not-quite-normal dialogue and uncomfortable just-barely-off-centre close-ups so that when things finally start going overtly wrong at around the hour mark, it feels almost like a relief - pain is easier to bear than the anticipation of it. I don't often enjoy trippy, "what the fuck is happening here" type stories and I REALLY don't often enjoy stories that end in the particular kind of twist this one used, but in this case I was absolutely sold on everything. Brilliant movie. Raised my blood pressure so high I had to flop on the couch and just breathe for like half an hour afterwards. No notes.
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Date: 2026-02-09 04:44 pm (UTC)EDIT: And in fact all three are available here on the horror streaming service Shudder, which tends to be really good about bringing in foreign films. Win!
If you happen to be interested in even more Australian horror, I really liked We Bury the Dead, which came out earlier this year (Daisy Ridley! everyone else is Australian though, I think), and Lake Mungo is considered a lowkey modern classic.
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Date: 2026-02-09 07:51 pm (UTC)Bring Her Back sounds like probably too much, but I've been trying to psych myself up for Lake Mungo because the dead teen/grieving parents premise sounds Risky for me but literally everything else about it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I've been most enjoying. And omg, I hadn't even heard of We Bury the Dead! Daisy Ridley!!! It looks like it's currently still showing in cinemas rather than on streaming - I might have to see if I can wrangle the childcare logistics, because it sounds fantastic. :D
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Date: 2026-02-10 03:14 am (UTC)Horror is such a vibrant genre, it's incredible. There's so much happening at all levels, right down to the most independent indie stuff. Horror of all flavors and themes and levels of art/shlock. I'm right there with you. I try not to evangelize too much, because horror is just never going to be the right genre for a lot of people, but we have it to so good here. Welcome. :)))
I actually went ahead and watched The Tunnel tonight, and I had a good time. :) I did feel like surely the government could have just come up with a bland excuse for why the water recycling thing wasn't going to work, but even when they didn't, I was skeptical that "oh they decided against a project" really suggested the degree of scandal the news crew thought it did. But the actual running around in tunnels with night vision on was great. Thanks for the rec! And believe it or not, Shudder also has an anniversary behind the scenes doc that's as long as the movie is, lol. So you could look out for that, it you're interested!
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Date: 2026-02-10 09:01 pm (UTC)I had no idea it was a significant enough movie to get a behind-the-scenes doc, wow. I'm always so tickled to learn that a piece of Australian media has broken containment that isn't Crocodile Dundee or the Wiggles.
If you were going to evangelise - willing evangelee here, and all - what would you say are some of your favourite horror films ever? Your "oh wow, this has Changed me and I wish I could share it with everyone" faves?
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Date: 2026-02-10 09:50 pm (UTC)And yeah, I felt the same about the homeless man. It's weird how often these movies suffer from the implausibility of their framing. You NEED the news stuff to feel real to sell the horror parts! Surely that's the easy part?
what would you say are some of your favourite horror films ever? Your "oh wow, this has Changed me and I wish I could share it with everyone" faves?
Oh man. Well, first of all, I feel like maybe those are two different questions. Some of my faves are horror comedy, and I don't so much feel those have changed me, just that I really enjoyed them. So here are two separate lists, without TOO much of me combing my exhaustive lists of stuff I've seen. I need to emphasize that these choices are super idiosyncratic. Horror is so individual, you know? Other horror fans would make totally different lists. I apologize in advance for the amount of gore and child harm/endangerment. /o\ HMU if you need more details about any of them.
Horror movies that were WHOLE ASS EXPERIENCES. You will probably bounce hard off some of these, because they're those kind of movies.
- Barbarian. Two strangers get doublebooked into the same Air BnB. I promise this is not the stranger danger story it sounds like. Flawed but absolutely wild structurally and really chewy thematically.
- Black Christmas (1974). A secret killer picks off members of a sorority house one by one. A slasher from before slashers were a codified genre, politically fascinating, and just a great time.
- Hell House LLC. Found footage movie about some young adults building a haunted house display in a hotel that actually turns out to be haunted. This is "will scare the shit out of you" entry on the list. The scariest clown in all of horror media IMO.
- The Lighthouse. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as homoerotic old timey lighthouse keepers. This may be the purest cinematic experience (tm) on this list. Impossible to describe.
- Mad God. Ummm this is a stop motion animation film that is about a world of the ugliest, grossest, cruelest stuff you can possibly imagine. It gives up on linear narrative entirely at about the half hour mark. It's absolutely mesmerizing and I cannot recommend it enough. This review will give you a good sense of whether you'd like it.
- The Substance. Demi Moore stars as an aging actress who takes a black market drug that produces a “younger, more perfect” version of her. I still don't know whether I liked this, but the filmmaking on display is something to behold. Incredibly visually striking.
- Triangle. One of the best mindfuck movies I've ever seen, and has Chris Hemsworth in a small part before he got famous. CW: this is ultimately about child abuse, but it takes a while to get there, and it's much more as a Theme and less on-screen. For comparison, there’s way less on-screen child trauma than Talk to Me.
- A Dark Song. Woman hires a guy to help her do a ritual to speak to her young son who died in a car wreck (from a drunk driver, I think?). Films with tiny budgets can nail the ineffable cosmic horror vibe in a way that almost no big budget movie ever does, and this is one of them.
My personal faves when I just want to have a good time:
- Re-Animator. Med students research how to revive the dead, which goes as well as you'd expect. Very shippy, very gory in that specific 80s practical effects way, but it's also a comedy, so like, it's hard to take most of it too seriously. YMMV. Has one of my all-time OTPs. <3
- Ready or Not. Girl vs her evil rich in-laws. Grace is my favorite final girl maybe ever. I love her so much. Also gory, also definitely a comedy.
- The Conjuring. This is ghost hunters vs haunted house at its simplest, but the character dynamics make the movie. (Diminishing returns on the sequels though.) This also is also kind of about parenting, but no children are harmed. In fact no one dies at all!
- The Fog (1980). Coastal town vs sea ghosts. Again, nothing novel here, just a fun cozy October watch with a lot of fun characters and character dynamics.
Anyway, SORRY, you activated the list button and the recs button at the same time. Hope you enjoyed this comment. 😂🙈
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Date: 2026-02-10 10:22 pm (UTC)Thanks for the heads up about the Tunnel making-of. I think I will skip that one then, lol.
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Date: 2026-02-10 10:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-10 01:57 am (UTC)I really enjoyed Relic, as dark as it is once you realize where they're going with the story. I love movies that mess around with dimensions like that. Plus the ending is . . . I'm not sure what to call it, but it's not fear or dread. Something about watching the mother gently peel the skin away and cradle the monster-grandmother in her arms got to me. It's so good.
I know what you mean about Talk To Me not being "fun" the way people have described. I will say the thing I remember hearing the most is that it's "brutal," which it is. It's an intense movie and once it starts, it just GOES and does not let up. Very well done, but I don't know if I'd watch it again in a hurry.
There's a YouTuber I like a lot called Girl On Film who did an episode on Australian horror. It has a reputation for being darker and more visceral than others. If you're hooked, that might be a good place to start!
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Date: 2026-02-10 10:47 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for the Girl On Film rec, too! I just watched the linked episode this morning and it was fascinating, a really great primer. Her point about the pervasive colonial influence on (white) Australian horror was really thought-provoking and apt. I think we really do as a nation have this painful awareness (albeit deeply buried in the subconscious, and you're not really allowed to talk about it outside liberal arts type circles) that we're all here living on land that not only doesn't belong to us but that we don't belong to, that's fundamentally wrong for our way of life. We all cluster around the coastline (which has natural terrors aplenty of its own, but is comparatively more forgiving) or in small pockets of agriculturally viable inland, but the vast majority of our territory is just utterly unlivable for people adapted to a Western lifestyle. Meanwhile, Aboriginal Australians lived on it for millennia before us and developed their whole culture in peaceful symbiosis with the land that white settlers are so sure is inherently hostile to human life. I'm so interested to watch Dark Place, the Aboriginal horror anthology she recommended. I think that just rose right to the top of my list.
On the other hand, I just watched Wolf Creek last night (post to come, probably) and her reaction to it was quite different from mine; she saw the character of Mick as having an inherent menace when he was first introduced, while my reaction to him was more unreservedly fond - up till he started with the murders, he reminded me of my granddad. But that probably also says a lot about the social position I inhabit (multi-generation white Australian, not a British tourist or a POC; female, but very used to navigating an environment of benevolent male chauvinism; urbanised, but with close family connections to rural life). If any one of those things weren't true, the outback would probably start feeling scary in a whole new way.
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Date: 2026-02-11 04:03 pm (UTC)"I think we really do as a nation have this painful awareness (albeit deeply buried in the subconscious, and you're not really allowed to talk about it outside liberal arts type circles) that we're all here living on land that not only doesn't belong to us but that we don't belong to, that's fundamentally wrong for our way of life."
Yep. I think American horror has a similar problem, but it manifests differently. There's this cowboy culture of "conquering the land" that we have to contend with, like yeah, we don't belong here, but we don't care, we're GOING to be here. And then there's the trope of everything being built on a former Indian burial ground, which I don't think Americans think about that hard, but it does come up a lot.
I haven't seen Wolf Creek myself, but from what you're describing, I wonder if that's the disconnect you were wondering about. If Mick strikes you as an example of "benevolent male chauvinism," I don't think we have that here. Honestly, what I keep thinking of is classism. If you've seen movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Deliverance there's an assumption that the audience will be automatically frightened, or at least unnerved, by the poor underclass living much closer to the land. It's another version of the tourism thing.
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Date: 2026-02-14 07:49 am (UTC)Class in Australia is more complicated. We absolutely have a streak of suspicion towards our poor underclass, but our national myth of egalitarianism is also still extremely strong, so urbanites all end up in this awkward bind where we're completely alienated from and scared of rural life but at the same time feel obliged to identify with it. Tall Poppy Syndrome is strong here. If you even for a second let on that you feel superior to some good old Aussie battler out on the wheatbelt, you are about to get cut down HARD. I wonder if something similar is going on in the US with your cowboy myths and all, and you're just a few decades ahead of us on the making-peace-with-urbanisation timeline. Because some of the American romanticisation I see of frontier life and cowboys and stuff does feel like something that could evolve from the current Australian self-image in another decade or two.
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Date: 2026-02-14 02:36 pm (UTC)They're the type to sit on their arse every night while their wife waits on them with dinner and a beer, but she is never, ever, ever going to have to lift a heavy piece of furniture or kill her own snakes and spiders or unclog a toilet.
Okay, this does sound familiar. I think it's more common in certain areas (like the South and the Midwest), but what I've experienced more often is guys who have that, "Don't worry you're pretty head about it, I'll fix that," attitude, but have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Like they know they're supposed to, but never learned what end of a wrench to use. Which leads to me going, "GIVE ME THAT," and pushing them out of the way to do it myself, and everyone leaves angry. I don't know what regional weirdness to blame that on, but it has happened to me more than once.
Here's a theory: American men are raised with this idea of needing to be the protector/provider, but for several generations now, increasing numbers of them are raised to think of mechanical labor as "beneath" them. Like that's the hired help's job. Again, it's a classism thing. But if a woman tries to do that same job, they'll assume she needs help. (See: My stepdad feeling insulted when I have to fix his printer for the dozenth time.) I once had my car break down, and three separate random dudes pulled over to try to "help" but none of them could figure it out when I explained the problem to them. We do have those guys like you're describing (see: my brother, who spent several days after one of our hurricanes helping strangers drag their cars out of flood zones), but the, "Hey sweetie, you need help with that?" type who end up breaking it worse are far more prevalent, in my experience.
I have heard of Tall Poppy Syndrome! It explained so much about every interaction I've had with an Australian--namely why we get along so well, lol. I think Americans have some degree of needing to feel connected to the land, but it's also very region specific. Like the South, or Appalachia, or the Midwest, or Texas. And God help you if you call a Southerner a "Yankee." One of the dumbest fights I've had with a coworker was someone trying to convince the best BBQ in the country was at a restaurant in New York. I was livid! But we've also got an alarming number of white nationalists with stupid ideas of what a "real" American looks like, and seem to forget we're all on stolen land. I think in their minds, we "won," so we deserve to be here, or something.
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