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Monday, October 29, 2012

Film The Scariest Movie You'll See This Halloween Doesn't Feature Monsters or Serial Killers. It's About Australians.

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 5:26 PM

Click to enlarge.

When I was a kid, I was too scared to watch horror movies. In my imagination, horror movies were truly uncomfortable experiences, featuring awful situations and real-life violence. When I finally watched my first horror movie—it was one of the Friday the 13th movies; I don't remember which—I was disappointed. There was no real horror, just gore. And instead of a creeping sense of dread, they were mostly a string of attacks, powered with jumpy scares. I watched more horror movies and found them to be mostly the same formula: Part action movie, part comedy, but always wiling to upend its own scares in a wink to readers. I've seen some very good ones—The Descent is still one of the scariest things I've seen in a theater—but I had never seen a movie that lived up to my childhood fears.

Until two nights ago. Wake in Fright, an Australian movie from 1971, is probably the closest thing to the movies that I imagined as a child that I'll ever see. There are no cartoonish monsters, no jump-in-your-seat moments, and no serial killers. But the Outback residents that our protagonist gets to know are more memorably terrifying than Freddy or Jason have ever been. Fright stars Gary Bond as a schoolteacher whose student loans force him to be assigned to a tiny Outback town. As he tries to make his way back to Sydney for Christmas break, he gets sidetracked in a slightly larger Outback town, where he falls in with the locals and their lifestyle, which includes a lot of gambling, drinking, and violence.

There are only a few movies about benders that really capture the gonzo spirit of a person who has entirely given up on sobriety. Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is one, Withnail and I is another. Unlike those two, Fright doesn't play itself off as a comedy. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, but the film mostly keeps a dispassionate eye on the disaster as it slowly unfolds. (Most notably, one scene features footage from a real-life Australian kangaroo hunt, and if you can't handle the sight of kangaroo bodies whipping through the air as bullets rip through them, you should skip this movie.) Wake in Fright is a horror story in the same way that Lord of the Flies is a horror story. It will leave you feeling uneasy, awed, and just a little bit sick. You've never seen a movie quite like it, except maybe in your imagination.

Wake in Fright screens at the SIFF Film Center every night through November 1st. It's not available on video.

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You could always torrent it.

Posted by OOF POOF on October 29, 2012 at 5:46 PM

I've heard "Wolf Creek" (based on a true story) is also pretty horrifying (which is why I haven't seen it...)

Posted by Cynic Romantic on October 29, 2012 at 6:24 PM

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a lousy book and a worse movie.

Posted by Approaching 40 in LA on October 29, 2012 at 6:24 PM

It is generally not available on video...but if you miss the screening ( try not to, it is amazing on the big screen) you can rent the DVD at Scarecrow. The DVD is PAL & region code 4, but you can play it on a computer.

You should see it at the theater though, watching movies on a computer or TV just doesn't compare with seeing them the way they are supposed to be seen.

Posted by Badger on October 29, 2012 at 7:03 PM

When you say readers you mean viewers right? Stuck in book editing mode? ;)

Posted by treefort on October 29, 2012 at 10:02 PM

@2 not that scary. Just gory and sadistic. Like Saw or one if those Rob Zombie horrors. People being fucked up.

Posted by CbytheSea on October 30, 2012 at 3:31 AM

You want something scary and Australian, Lake Mungo on Netflix was surprisingly good.

Posted by gnot on October 30, 2012 at 7:19 AM

OK, I am an unabashed hater of horror movies. I don't like being scared, and I abhor gore.

But I also used to date a horror aficionado, and he coerced me into watching a few....

I thought The Descent was one of the worst clunkers I've seen in a long time. Utterly obvious, cliche, and rendered completely unscary by all the distracting girl-drama going on between characters that you don't give a crap about. It was terrible, but everyone else I've ever known said they loved it!!! Did I watch it wrong, or what?

Posted by More, I Say! on October 30, 2012 at 9:45 AM