10 years of homegrown horror hits: talk to me and the golden age of aussie horror

The past decade has been a golden one for Australian horror, bookended by The Babadook in 2014 and the current sensation Talk to Me. The global premiere of Jennifer Kent’s groundbreaking

supernatural bogeyman film at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival caused ripples that became a wave. The Babadook attracted international acclaim, winning the New York Film Critics Circle Award

for Best First Feature. The Exorcist’s director, William Friedkin, called it the most terrifying film he’d ever seen. Talk to Me, the directorial feature debut of brothers Danny and Michael

Philippou, also premiered internationally at Sundance, where it sparked a bidding war. Now in cinemas, Talk to Me has surpassed industry projections to gross more than US$10 million (A$15.2

million) in North America on its opening weekend, and opened at number four in Australia. Talk to Me’s success story is not just commercial but critical: the film currently has a 94%

approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. This horror high water mark carries the legacy of Australia’s strong horror history, while signalling the shedding of some cultural biases that have

constrained our culture of innovation in spookery. THE AUSTRALIAN NEW WAVE Australia’s golden horror decade has roots in the Australian New Wave, a particularly productive period for

Australian film from the 1970s to the late 1980s dominated by two key horror subgenres on opposing ends of the taste spectrum. The high-brow Australian Gothic includes critically esteemed

dramas Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Walkabout (1971). These films are structured by enigmatic narratives with horror-tinged edges, in which the ethereal beauty of the bush also bears

quasi-supernatural menace. ------------------------- _ READ MORE: AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC: FROM HANGING ROCK TO NICK CAVE AND KYLIE, THIS GENRE EXPLORES OUR DARK SIDE _ -------------------------

Low-brow Ozploitation films were popular in drive-in theatres, but often critically derided for their “tasteless” violence and sex and for cribbing flagrantly from Hollywood horror. Classics

of the genre include Razorback (1984), pitched as “Jaws on trotters” (the film features a murderous bush hog), and Patrick (1978), about a man in a coma with psychokinetic (and

psychosexual) powers. Ozploitation is often seen as the rebelliously gory, commercially oriented antagonist to the Australian Gothic’s highbrow works of art. ------------------------- _ READ

MORE: OUR ENDURING LOVE OF MAD MAX'S AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK: AN ANARCHIC WASTELAND OF SADO-MASOCHISTIC PUNK VILLAINS AND OCKER CLOWNS _ ------------------------- DESTROYING THE HIGH/LOW

CULTURE BINARY This binary persisted into the early 21st century. The international commercial success of homegrown horror hits such as Saw (2004) and Wolf Creek (2005) was often accompanied

by domestic critical derision: Margaret Pomeranz and David Stratton refused to review Wolf Creek 2 (2013). The horror films of the past decade tend to trample over this high/low genre

binary. These films experiment with art cinema aesthetics and deploy narrative strategies of prestige drama, echoing the Australian Gothic. However the supernatural elements are an explicit

narrative structuring device, unashamedly emphasising their horror identities. The ghosts and bogeymen of films like The Babadook, Relic (2020) and Talk to Me provoke shock and disgust,

while also poetically expressing psychological turmoils that evade coherent explanation. In The Babadook, this turmoil erupts from shared grief between mother and son. In Natalie Erika

James’ debut feature Relic, a grandmother’s descent into dementia impels the reverberation of spectral traumas across three generations. In Talk to Me, a blossoming teen friendship is

possessed by the unquiet spirit of the protagonist’s dead mother. Alongside this nuanced dramatic core, Talk To Me pushes the boundaries of good taste with gleeful abandon in true

Ozploitation style. It features gruesome possession-induced self-harm and more than 100 swear words. The narrative centres on a darkly comic analogy (instead of drug-taking, the teens become

addicted to the occult pleasures of the talismanic hand) that would be at home in a grindhouse drive-in. This play with high/low culture boundaries filters into Talk To Me’s play with

audience emotions and expectations. At times while watching, my body was tensely primed for a gory eye-gouging; instead I was met with a gentle moment of connection between two characters.

At other moments, tender sequences give way unexpectedly to viscous spurts of blood. The ghouls of this golden decade are at home on the red carpets of festivals such as Sundance, yet they

also drip with the blood and bodily fluids of their Ozploitation forebears. A COLLECTIVE ENERGY Our current golden age of horror has grown out of a collective creative energy. The Philippou

brothers worked on The Babadook as 19-year-olds and credit Kent’s influence as key to their creative approach. The Babadook was the debut film from Australian production company Causeway

Films, and Talk To Me is their latest picture, led by producer Samantha Jennings. Jennings and Causeway have been critical to the collective currents that have propelled our golden horror

decade. They also produced the conceptually layered zombie horror-drama Cargo (2017) and witch folk horror You Won’t Be Alone (2021), Australia’s submission for the Academy Awards for Best

International Feature. This decade of ingenuity has demonstrated Australian horror films can find international success blending the highbrow and lowbrow, yet the constraining thinking of

the New Wave-era continues to haunt the local screen sector. Kent’s The Babadook received a limited release on only 13 screens in Australia after being deemed too “art-house”. James’

internationally acclaimed Relic was not screened theatrically on home soil until three years after its Sundance premiere (a screening I co-organised with ACMI). You Won’t Be Alone might have

been Australia’s Oscars submission, but it did not receive a single nomination at our local AACTA Awards. The last decade has showcased that Australian horror can be worthy of domestic and

critical attention _and_ a gory good time with commercial appeal. Perhaps the success of Talk to Me both at the box office and with critics will encourage us to listen.

------------------------- _ READ MORE: WE'RE IN A GOLDEN AGE OF BLACK HORROR FILMS _ -------------------------