Ozploitation

• The past decade has been a golden one for Australian horror, bookended by The Babadook in 2014 and the current sensation Talk to Me.
• The global premiere of Jennifer Kent’s groundbreaking supernatural bogeyman film at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival caused ripples that became a wave.
• Talk to Me’s success story is not just commercial but critical: the film currently has a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Australian New Wave

• Australia’s golden horror decade has roots in the Australian New Wave, a particularly productive period for Australian film from the 1970s to the late 1980s dominated by two key horror subgenres on opposing ends of the taste spectrum.
• The high-brow Australian Gothic includes critically esteemed dramas Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Walkabout (1971).

Destroying the high/low culture binary

• The horror films of the past decade tend to trample over this high/low genre binary.
• These films experiment with art cinema aesthetics and deploy narrative strategies of prestige drama, echoing the Australian Gothic.
• In Natalie Erika James’ debut feature Relic, a grandmother’s descent into dementia impels the reverberation of spectral traumas across three generations.
• This play with high/low culture boundaries filters into Talk To Me’s play with audience emotions and expectations.

A collective energy

• Our current golden age of horror has grown out of a collective creative energy.
• The Philippou brothers worked on The Babadook as 19-year-olds and credit Kent’s influence as key to their creative approach.
• Jennings and Causeway have been critical to the collective currents that have propelled our golden horror decade.