Ooze and Oz

Wolf Creek: no Texas, no chainsaw, yes massacre.

By Cheryl Eddy

Horror movie trends may come and go – one minute, masked psychos are the rage; the next, it's all about the zombies – but road-trip terror is evergreen. The fear of drifting off the main highway and encountering something sinister goes back to Sawney Bean, leader of a notorious gang that preyed on travelers in 16th-century Scotland. We're talking murder, cannibalism, inbreeding, torture – basically, this guy was Hannibal Lecter, Ed Gein, Norman Bates, Cary Stayner, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Blair Witch, the witch from Hansel and Gretel, the rednecks from Deliverance, and the families from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, all rolled into one delicious maniac.

Thanks to the legacy of ol' Sawney, we're well prepped to expect the worst when good-looking youngsters pile into a car for some fancy-free R&R. House of Wax? Doomed. House of 1000 Corpses? Toast. Wrong Turn? Forget it. In the real world, serial killers seem to prefer cities, but in the movies the scariest shit goes down in the deep woods. City slickers taking back-road shortcuts might as well paint targets on their SUVs.

But they never learn, do they? And we love 'em for it – especially since the formula still cranks out premium-grade nightmare material. Australian import Wolf Creek finds a perfectly unsettling horror location in the country's vast, sparsely populated outback. This is a place with no cell phone reception, seemingly no law enforcement, beautiful but inhospitable landscapes, and potently unfriendly locals. If that doesn't intrigue you right off the bat, know this: The actual events that inspired writer-director Greg McLean's film were called "the Backpacker Murders," an appellation that somehow manages to be both stark and horribly evocative.

Wolf Creek's fictionalized tourists are a pair of Brits, Liz (Cassandra Magrath) and Kristy (Kestie Morassi), as well as Aussie Ben (Nathan Phillips), who set off in their newly acquired rust bucket to visit a meteorite crater tucked into the wilderness. Right away the omens begin to pile up: tales of UFO sightings, sleazy yokels making gang-bang jokes, weird weather, and the verbalized observation "There's nothing out here!" Nothing, except jolly bush-dweller Mick (John Jarratt, who – in a nice dovetailing of eerie-Aussie-film history – was also in 1975's Picnic at Hanging Rock). When their car breaks down, the kids are grateful when Mick appears in the darkness; they're less appreciative when he drops the Crocodile Dundee act and bloody mayhem breaks out. Here's another fun fact about the Backpacker Murders: Mick's "head on a stick" routine (you'll know it when you see it) is taken from autopsies done on the real-life victims.

So why should you bother taking yet another trip down the highway to hell? (Unlike House of Wax, this one doesn't even afford you the pleasure of a Paris Hilton death scene.) Accents and occasional emu sightings aside, Wolf Creek's skeletal remains aren't all that different from Texas Chainsaw homages past. But it's also relentlessly grim, occasionally jaw-dropping, and lensed with the sort of it-could-happen-to-you urgency that digital cameras so deftly convey. In many ways it's a back-to-basics road-horror movie with a little extra evil on the side – something for O.G. Sawney Bean to enjoy, perhaps while he's picking your bones out of his teeth.

Anticipating the movie's stateside release, Wolf Creek writer-director Greg McLean weighed in on his feature debut over the phone from Melbourne, Australia.

Bay Guardian: Americans are crazy for true crime. Are Australians? How has Wolf Creek been received there?

Greg McLean: I don't think true crime is as widely marketed as a genre in Australia, though we do have a fascination with shows like CSI. The film has been remarkably well received, considering the more conservative culture here. We don't make a lot of horror films, so it's a breath of fresh air, on one level, to be such an aggressive film.

BG: Wolf Creek is a realistic film in that it's based on true events, is shot without flashy camera tricks, and so on. But it also has subtle supernatural elements. It's as if Mick is the culmination of forces of nature that the kids can't avoid.

GM: There's a tradition in the film of dark powers in the world that focus around characters and places. If characters were isolated out there, these forces could work through them – something in the land coming through someone and making them into this monster. Some of the real people this movie was loosely based on were guys with a lot of time on their hands. Their isolation was linked to the brutality of their crimes because no one interacting normally with other people could come up with that kind of brutality.

BG: What do you think about the movie opening in America on Christmas?

GM: It's pretty sick, but it's kind of funny in a way – funny crazy. I think horror fans will love it, but obviously it's not a movie to everyone's taste. It's an interesting piece of counterprogramming.

'Wolf Creek' opens Sun/25 in Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for showtimes.