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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 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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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, Maori 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 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 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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