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Podcast

A Field Guide to Antipodean Horror.

Horror is the most honest thing a country ever makes. It's where a culture puts the stuff it can't say at the dinner table. The guilt. The fear. The history that didn't make the tourism brochure.

Australia made a hundred years of films about the land itself trying to kill you. New Zealand made films about what lives in the dark between the trees.

What are they actually afraid of?

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Episodes
Episode 06 Narration ~26 min

Something Evil Woke Up At Hanging Rock

On Saturday the fourteenth of February 1900, three schoolgirls and their mathematics teacher climbed Hanging Rock and never came down. The date never existed. Neither did the girls. Australia remembers them anyway. Joan Lindsay, the woman who stopped clocks, and the novel she dreamed in two weeks. The final chapter that solved the mystery, cut before publication and hidden for twenty years. The earthquake Peter Weir buried under the picnic. And the real vanishing at the Rock that the story never touches.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Picnic at Hanging Rock · 1975
Episode 05 Narration ~30 min

Life Before Jackson

In 1984 a gory little film about mutants on an island won the grand prize at a Paris festival of fantastic cinema, with Alejandro Jodorowsky heading the jury. It was called Death Warmed Up, and it came out three years before Bad Taste. New Zealand horror did not start with Peter Jackson. A broke, isolated country was already making films soaked in dread. Strange Behavior. The Scarecrow. Death Warmed Up. Mr Wrong. The Quiet Earth. But it was a settler cinema with a blind spot, and it looked straight past the oldest seam of the supernatural on its own islands. That story had to wait for Māori filmmakers, who arrived in the same year Jackson did.

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The Scarecrow (1982)
The Scarecrow · 1982
Bonus Drop SFF 2026 · Interview

SFF Double Bill: Mockbuster & The Peril at Pincer Point

Two films from Sydney Film Festival, two director conversations, one drop. First, Mockbuster, Anthony Frith's Australian doc about a struggling filmmaker who gets the call to make a knock off for The Asylum, the studio behind Sharknado. Then The Peril at Pincer Point, the gloriously strange folk horror from Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine, where a sound recordist washes up inside a nautical prophecy. We sat down with the people who made them.

SFF 2026 Double Bill
SFF 2026 Double Bill
Episode 04 Narration ~42 min

The Exploitation Years

In 1981, the Australian government introduced a tax rule and accidentally funded the most prolific horror decade this country has ever produced. Patrick. Long Weekend. Thirst. Roadgames. Razorback. How a bureaucratic accident built a horror industry — and why the country spent thirty years pretending it didn't exist.

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Razorback
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Episode 03 Narration ~25 min

The New Wave

July 2023. Two brothers from Brisbane made a horror film for four and a half million dollars. It made ninety-two million at the box office. Something had changed. This episode covers the last ten years of ANZ horror — Talk to Me, Relic, Lake Mungo, Hounds of Love, The Moogai, Mārama — and asks what shifted. The first wave pointed outward at the landscape. The new wave has turned inward. Into the body. Into the home. Into the thing nobody wants to name.

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Talk to Me
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Episode 02 Narration ~35 min

Peter Jackson's Bloody Education

New Zealand got a film industry almost by accident. Under a prime minister who would have hated most of what it made. And for the first decade of that wave, Māori filmmakers didn't have cameras. That is not a metaphor. That is the thing that runs underneath everything. Bad Taste. Braindead. A nineteen-year-old from Pukerua Bay with a Super 8 camera and friends who said yes. What a country with all of that in its bones produces when someone decides to start anyway.

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Braindead
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Episode 01 Narration ~30 min

The Outback as Monster

Seventy percent of Australia is essentially uninhabitable. Not difficult. Not remote. Uninhabitable. And Australian filmmakers looked at all of that and said: yeah. Let's make horror films about it. Long Weekend. Wolf Creek. Razorback. Three directors. Three decades. One buried argument about a country that took land it had no right to and has been making horror films about it ever since. This is where the show starts. It's a good place to start.

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Wolf Creek
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