Chilling new film The Royal Hotel tells the story of two female backpackers threatened by men in an outback town. It's just the latest work to depict menace in rural Australia, writes Dan Slevin.
Horror movies derive much of their atmosphere and effectiveness from their locations. Imagine The Wicker Man in the garden of an English country house instead of an isolated Hebridean island. Or The Shining, if it had been set in a sunny hotel on Venice Beach rather than a snowed-in resort in the Rocky Mountains.But no location has proved more effective at regularly scaring audiences over the last 50 years than that most remote of locales, the Australian outback.
There, they have to deal with boorish male locals, who don't seem to realise how threatening their behaviour to the visitors is – it's all just drunken banter to them until it gets out of hand. The potential for violence haunts Hotel Coolgardie – audiences know that the only person who could protect these women if a situation goes bad is the cameraman – but it comes to a head in The Royal Hotel.
When his strategy to gamble his way to the funds needed to pay off his debts fails spectacularly, John Grant quickly discovers that the locals are not friendly. His unwilling sojourn in"The Yabba" descends into a desperate nightmare of alcohol abuse and mental torment, as the remoteness of the town, the brutal landscape and the inhospitable people conspire to drive Grant mad.
One such Ozploitation movie was Peter Weir's early comedy/horror The Cars That Ate Paris . It told the bizarre and twisted story of an outback town whose townspeople deliberately cause fatal motor accidents in order to repurpose the vehicles into wild pre-punk stylised four-wheeled creations. New Zealand Filmmaker and commentator Doug Dillaman has a theory:"Survival is a fundamental goal of a horror narrative and the outback itself provides challenges to survival galore. Isolation from civilisation and its comforts and norms, heat, lack of water, all challenge any visitors. Add to that epic distances and indistinguishable landscapes and surviving on its own is terrifying."
As a backdrop, it's such a vivid one. The horizon line expresses such a sense of expanse, and it doesn't require much to capture it – Jason Di Rosso Dillaman believes that the demonisation of life in the outback is part of a wider drive in the horror genre that extends far beyond Australia."There's a huge aspect of horror that translates across cultures – class fear.
On the practical side of things as well, Dillaman suggests that filmmakers have a bit more freedom and control out in the country than in the city:"Cheap are manna from heaven for filmmakers, as are isolated locations where you can make a lot of noise or do wildly inappropriate things."
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