The Bloody Legacy of Australia and NZ’s Horror Films

Who makes the best horror films? It’s a question frequently, viciously, debated between genre fans. Japan brought us classics like Ringu, Ju-On and Audition, A24 continues to raise the bar in the US, and revered subgenres like French extremity and Giallo have been born out of Europe. Poor old Australia and Aotearoa (NZ) can often find themselves left out of the conversation.

Australian and New Zealand horror cinemas sit at decidedly opposite ends of the spectrum from each other, characterised by their bleakness and humour. Comedies are Aotearoa’s bread and butter, but for locals the humour runs deeper than a cheap laugh. New Zealand cinema is inevitably influenced by our size, and with that comes seclusion. As a dot on the map, our film industry tends to produce stories of lonely kids, behind-the-times towns and lofty wishes. Australia, despite its mammoth size, also takes influence from isolation. While the country is the 6th largest, physically, in the world, the vast and desolate areas contain endless real life horrors. Spiders and snakes are nothing compared to the brutality of an infinite outback. The cruelty of the barren land sets the tone for much of Australian horror cinema. 

In 2004, Saw redefined fear in the eyes of the public, as Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween and Blair Witch had done in the decades prior. What’s often overlooked, given that the film was produced and set in America, is that director James Wan, and screenwriter Leigh Whannel, are from Perth – on the country’s west coast – and Melbourne, nestled on the east. A SE7EN inspired crime-horror flick, the $1.2 million budget Saw features its protagonists chained up in a derelict bathroom and challenged to play a game of sheer willpower. Solidifying torture porn as a genre with it’s spine-chilling human traps, Saw has been on the receiving end of no shortage of negative press and criticism. But the box office numbers rose and a cult following formed. With the release of Saw X, in September, the franchise is undergoing a renaissance of adoration from genre lovers. 

After the outrageous success of Saw (which was the 59th highest grossing film of 2004 – highly impressive for a small budget, independent film with two unknowns at its helm) the writer/director duo of Wan and Whannel created Insidious, before Wan became the sole creator of The Conjuring Universe. Together, the two have changed horror. And they’re not the only ones. 

Peter Jackson is without question one of the most significant directors of the century so far – not just in New Zealand – and fans of his more commercial work might be surprised to know that Jackson’s roots are firmly planted in horror and practical effects mastery. His most notable genre works, Braindead, Bad Taste and The Frighteners are all sickeningly gory slapstick horrors that squirt bright red blood and stomach churning pus at its audience like there’s no tomorrow. While The Frigheteners isn’t set in New Zealand, as the other two are, its locations are recognisable to any Wellington or Lyttleon local.

Heavenly Creatures, a horror-adjacent drama, bolstered the careers of Melanie Lynsky and Jackson himself, gaining him his first Academy Award nomination, along with Fran Walsh, for Best Original Screenplay. The whimsical and pensive true-crime retelling was undoubtedly a departure from Jackson’s usual schlocky, splatter films.

And NZ horror is, to this day, defined by Jackson's own style, having been followed by a surge of horror-comedies and practical FX-based films. 2006’s Black Sheep ushered in a wave of hungry young horror fans, and most New Zealanders in their 20s have a memory of squeamishly enduring the film at the whim of an older brother or cousin and spending subsequent weeks avoiding any particularly rabid looking sheep in the wops. Deathgasm, about a teen heavy metal band that accidently summon an ancient evil, and Fresh Meat, which involves a family of modern-day Māori cannibals kidnapped by a local gang, continued the horror-comedy legacy in the 2010s. 

Internationally, 2022’s smash hit M3GAN was directed by New Zealand's Gerard Johnson – born in Invercargill and most known for writing and directing the comedy series The Jaquie Brown Diaries and 2014’s local horror-comedy Housebound.

It’s hard to say exactly why gross-out gore and campiness has such a place in New Zealand horror. Perhaps the rural upbringings many New Zealanders experience has exposed them to so much already that they have to push the boundaries even further to feel shocked. When you’ve birthed a calf, shovelled shit and pulled a maggot-covered possum carcass from a trap, all before the age of 10, you’re not disgusted by much in your adulthood. 

Horror-comedies aside, comedy is New Zealand biggest on screen output, and it bleeds into what’s produced in NZ. The renowned works of Taika Waititi and Flight of the Conchords aside, there is a small town sense of humour, built upon the awkwardness of our conservative parents, the sweaty embarrassment of teenage summers and the outrageous antics of our drunken uncles in dirty stubbies at family gatherings. Seeing the humour in our own backyard is a part of New Zealand’s DNA. 

It’s curious that horror-comedy almost seems to be New Zealand's only horror output, but given the success of local comedies, funding bodies don’t appear to want to gamble on serious horror projects. Without money limiting New Zealand creators to one subgenre, what other patterns would we see in NZ horror? Hopefully one day we’ll have the chance to find out.

Far from the humour found across the ditch, Australian horror has its own distinguishing features. Aside from the extremely grisly violence made famous by the Saw franchise, a true bleakness permeates Australian horror cinema. From Wolf Creek, a torture porn serial killer tale set in the enormous and unforgiving Australian desert, to 2008’s criminally underrated Lake Mungo, a found footage film focusing on a haunted family desperate to discover what lead up to their daughters drowning. Yes, Australian horror has a deeply unnerving and stark quality to it. 

The vast outback is a clear influence on much of this, most notably the Wolf Creek films. Many real life stories of people being lost and succumbing to death without supplies or a working vehicle have influenced a general fear of Australia's sparsely occupied “back garden” – supposedly the desert claims around 40 lives a year. 

Even when the land doesn’t explicitly feature, its bleakness is essential to Australian horror cinema. Set in the city of Adelaide, recent Aussie film Talk To Me (directed by Danny and Michael Philippou) made waves among horror lovers – being compared to Hereditary for its combination of pitch-perfect drama and gruelling body horror sequences. A feeling of hopelessness follows the film through to its end credits. 

The Babadook, often a key reference point in conversations about “elevated horror” and “trauma horror”, is a dry, dense and unforgiving work of mastery. At its heart it’s a story about grief, and it attacks this without the glossiness seen more frequently in American work. 

Then there’s Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones: The tale of a Home-and-Away-type highschool hottie who is kidnapped by an unhinged classmate to be her prom date, features an isolated location at the end of long dirt road, a family of “backwards” loners and plenty of unsightly home-toolkit torture. It’s an overlooked masterpiece of Australian cinema, a film that encapsulates the most distinguishable elements of ocker horror.

There’s no doubt that Aotearoa and Australian cinema has carved a distinctive line in horror history – making audiences laugh, squeal, weep and scream in true terror. Film has the power to document our wildest fantasies and most uncomfortable truths, and by its nature will forever be available to be consumed, dissected and discussed. Oceanic filmmakers have put the focus on the horrors of having nowhere to run – whether it be because your town is too small, or the outback, endless.

It may not be our most known legacy, but scratch a little under the surface, and you’ll see horror is as ingrained in who we are as BBQs and bungee jumping – and without us, the genre wouldn’t be the same. 

Rachel Barker is a writer / producer at VICE NZ in Aotearoa. You can find her @rachellydiab on IG and Letterboxd and see her film criticism on Youtube.