Scott, John

Biron, Dean

2010

As with "Crocodile Dundee" before it, the recent Australian film "Wolf Creek" promotes a specific and arguably urban-centric understanding of rural Australia. However, whilst the former film is couched in mythologized notions of the rural idyll, "Wolf Creek" is based firmly around the concept of rural horror. Wolf Creek is both a horror movie and a road movie, one which relies heavily upon landscape in order to tell its story. Here we argue that the film continues a tradition in the New Australian Cinema of depicting the outback and its inhabitants as something the country's mostly coastal population do not understand. "Wolf Creek" skilfully plays on popular conceptions of inland Australia as empty and harsh. But more than this, the film brings to the fore tensions in the rural idyll associated with the ownership and use of rural space. As an object of urban consumption, rural space may appear passive and familiar, but in the context of rural horror iconic aspects of the Australian landscape become a source of fear – a space of abjection.

Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 24(2), p. 307-322

1469-3666

1030-4312

https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/5473

en

Routledge

Wolf Creek, rurality and the Australian Gothic

Journal Article

Publication