The Quay Brothers
Philip Ridley
Richard Stanley
Shinya Tsukamoto
The Company of Wolves
The Descent
Dust Devil
The Hills Have Eyes
Jaws
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
The Quatermass Xperiment
Wolf Creek
Deleted Scenes
Contact
By looking at a range of critically popular horror films it becomes apparent that the landscapes within these narratives are specifically chosen in order to perform both an aesthetic and functional role: each environment is simultaneously depicted as being beautiful and chaotic, as both passive and aggressive. These visual qualities place a greater emphasis on their role as an isolating setting and, by doing so, become a quietly antagonistic character in themselves. This can be seen most explicitly within Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), in which Police Chief Martin Brody must overcome his fear of the sea in order to not only kill the Great White Shark that threatens Amity Island but also to regain control over who he is. For Brody, the ocean becomes the site for this rite of passage, a testing ground of his civilised nature against the primitive space of the shark. By creating this conflict, parallels can be made between characters and the landscape, and so enforce the tensions within the narrative.
Within horror films, the threat often inhabits the depicted landscape and so must be equated with it, making them as hostile and as primitive as the space itself. Conversely, the protagonist enters into the landscape, either to live there (and so making them the outsider) or as part of a trip in which they want to experience the romantic notion of the wilderness. These defining traits are evident in a range of contemporary horror films – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper,1974), Jaws, John Carpenter’s The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) and Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) – and in each, the protagonists successfully survive the crisis of the film: Sally must escape from Leatherface and the rest of his demented family, MacReady and Childs must freeze to death in order to contain The Thing, Heather and Mike must succumb to the presence within the Burkittsville wood in order to understand what it actual is, and in Wolf Creek, Liz, Kirsty and Ben must survive their ordeal with bushman Mick Taylor.
In many respects this connection between landscape and character correlates with interpretations of the Western. There, the landscape is almost always the Frontier, a wild and hostile space waiting to be discovered, explored, charted and civilised by society. This, obviously, means that the narrative threat is more often than not the Native American Indian. These people are truly of the land, living within and harvesting in harmony and without destruction to the landscape. Yet their cinematic depiction was one as wild and as hostile as the landscape in which they lived. They were a threat but one that was easily terminated with a bullet. Within horror films, the threat is not so easily destroyed, and for those films that specifically use the landscape as a signifier, the threat often survives, disappearing back into the landscape from where it came. The notion of the Frontier also remains intact - regardless of geographical location - and each landscape remains unaltered by the narrative, continuing to exist as a space which refuses the progress of civilization. The landscape retains its sense of purity, its beauty and its hostile qualities. It is for these reasons that they provide such convincing locations: they can not be changed, remaining forever fixed in a hostile state, regardless of who ventures over their boundary.
Taken on its own, Wolf Creek can be interpreted as a hybrid of two genres, the American horror film (or perhaps more precisely the serial killer subgenre) and Australian landscape cinema. This sense of duality provides a means of interpreting the narrative content as it takes both genres’ modes of representing the landscape and converts it to satisfy its narrative and visual agenda. By doing this, the film makes a parallel between the formal use of landscape in these genres, both of which use the landscape as a formidable element. In films such as Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), for example, the sublime sense of otherness that permeates through the mythic of the outback has its parallel in films such as Jaws. Both interpret nature as something to be feared, as a Frontier space that is well beyond man’s understanding as much as beyond his civilizing grasp. This idea of nature is given a physical form and exerts itself, to varying violent degrees, upon the narratives protagonists: the terror of nature manifest itself as the Great White Shark in Jaws and within the eerie, supernatural site of Hanging Rock.
The first image of Wolf Creek is of the landscape: waves unfolding onto the shore at Broome, Western Australia: the sun is rising and casts the sea into liquid silver and gold, each metal rolling into the other as it moves towards the dull copper shore. It is a romantic image, an ideal as much as it is idyllic. This is the sea we imagine, the sea that we dream of. It is, to debase it, a postcard sent home to the family. But, for all of this, the sea represents the duality of most horror film landscapes: simultaneously beautiful in its splendor and as equally terrifying in its hostility. As Jonathan Lemkin describes it in his essay “Archetypal Landscape and Jaws,” the sea is “a place of the unknown: the life that lies beneath its surface, however dreadful, is greater than is visible” and that it “is a place beyond the rule of man, whose influence stops at the shoreline” (Lemkin, 1996: 279). This single image acts as a precursor to what is to come within the narrative, introducing to the audience the other beautifully quiet antagonist of the film, the wilderness.
After a night of partying, Liz wakes up on the beach and looks out at the sea, watching the waves roll upon the shore. She gets up, takes off her top and runs into the sea. The waves wash over her, momentarily covering her as they rush towards the shore. The sea, the waves dwarf her, absorbing her into its continuous flow. This sense of scale, this disappearing into the landscape, becomes a recurrent motif within the film, particularly when the three protagonists are driving through the outback towards Wolf Creek. Its constant repetition reminds both the protagonists and the viewer of the duality of the sea, of the outback, of the wilderness: its beauty is its horror.
Hung over, Liz, Kirsty and Ben quietly pack their belongings into their car and begin their journey through the Australian outback and on to that other wilderness, the Great Barrier Reef. Their journey is explicitly about the landscape for their planned route incorporates as many tourist sites as possible: Magnetic Island, Mission Beach, Cairns and their final destination, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. As the three travel towards their first destination, Halls Creek, a montage of images details their journey: close up images of the three talking, singing and sleeping are cut against images of the passing landscape - vast tracts of sun-baked soil and intensely deep blue skies.
What little there is of buildings at Emu Creek epitomizes the failed attempts to civilize the outback. There is the garage, weather beaten and sun-baked, its corrugated roof rusting and pock marked with holes. Rubbish has been piled up in corners, scrap metal dumped and left to rust. The windows are covered in a thick layer of dust. The constant drone of flies. There seems to be a few houses, each in a similar stage of dilapidation. Liz goes off to the toilets whilst Ben starts to fill the tank. Kirsty lights a cigarette, looks around and goes over to a collapsing fence. Looking over she sees the vast expanse of the outback stretch out into the distance. Dumped in front of it, behind the fence, is an array of household rubbish. Scattered amongst it are unwanted tables and chairs, a filing cabinet, broken fridges and freezers lined up like some sort of shining white barricade between civilization and the wilderness. Kirsty exhales cigarette smoke and walks away.
Walking up and into the Wolf Creek crater is like walking into the sea, like stepping into a no-mans land where there is only wilderness. The crater is empty, timeless, mythic, and astral in its proportion and in its origin. Here nature clearly holds sway, a presence as an unknown force that drifts lazily in the cool winds that blow across the outback, one that gathers in the storm clouds as it begins to rain. As the three travellers approach the crater the blue skies fade to grey and that drizzle begins. It is not meant to rain on the trip of a lifetime. It is meant to be – or least imagined to be – as bright and hot and as idyllic as the sea unfolding onto Broome beach.
On Ben’s map the crater looked somewhat insignificant, appearing only as a symbol within the surrounding landscape. In reality it is an awesome sight: a massive indentation that lends an intensity of scale to the endless, empty landscape that surrounds it. Seen briefly from Liz’s point of view, the boundaries of the crater stretch far beyond her field of vision. All she can manage to say is “Wow… that’s impressive.” The three begin to scramble around the crater’s rim and, for the only time in the entire film, the image cuts from a realism orientated hand-held camera work to a fixed aerial perspective: looking down upon Wolf Creek, the image places emphasis on the scale of both the crater and the landscape, the road leading up to it drowning in all of that vast emptiness. The crater suddenly appears as an immense anomaly in the ruptured continuum of the outback, a dislocated moment that is not of any time or era. It is simply there, aberrant and unique.
From the first moments Liz, Ben and Kirsty have meet Mick Taylor, they realise he is a man who likes to laugh. As Mick tries to repair their car, the four talk, there is conversation punctuated with Mick’s laugh – a repetitive snigger that is has a slightly mocking and cruel edge to it. Mick’s sense of humour and his willingness to both mock himself induces a sense of security with this man. As Liz says, “He’s funny… he’s like some sort of Crocodile Dundee!”
Once he has drugged, bound and separated his victims, Mick stops laughing. The hunt is, for now, over and the long, drawn out torture of his three victims can begin. His torture of Kristy is humiliating and degrading, prolonging an inevitable rape, dismemberment and murder. In the face of such serious brutality, one should not laugh. But, should the opportunity arise for one more joke, then it must be cracked. And it is that one final joke that simultaneously quotes cinema and consolidates Mick’s relationship to the landscape.
Just as Liz finally gets one of the stolen cars started, Mick appears and plunges his hunting knife into her back. The blade breaks her ribs and probably punctures her lungs. Mick knows this because he knows how to kill animals and that’s what tourists are to Mick, animals. He’s done this a lot of times before and knows where to insert the blade to incapacitate instead of kill. He pulls out the knife and gives Liz a chance to escape. She manages to get out of the car and to crawl towards the door until Mick stops her. In her final defensive act, Liz takes out her Swiss Army knife, haphazardly waving it before Mick. Now, that is funny. The knife seems so small and so blunt in the current situation. Mick smiles and then laughs as he wipes Liz’s blood off his knife. He looks up at the garage ceiling and muses: “It’s like your little mate said before, that’s not a knife, this is a knife!” and then he brings down his blade, its nickel sharp edge cutting three of Liz’s fingers clean off.
Connected through this quote as much by fore name, Mick Taylor is obviously a horrifyingly feral version of Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee – of Peter Fairman’s Crocodile Dundee (1986). Within their respective narratives, both Taylor and Dundee are aberrant white males whose professional and social lives rely on the outback. Both demonstrate a white male superiority over the landscape and nature. Dundee’s exaggerated struggle with a crocodile and his efficient killing of one when it attacks journalist Sue Charlton is no different to Taylor’s past as a Head Shooter - coupled with his explicit descriptions of hunting techniques. But whereas Dundee is a pseudo-bushman who tells the time not by looking at the height and position of the sun but by a quick glance at his digital wrist watch, Taylor is a genuine manifestation of the bushman: rugged, tattooed and with slicked back hair. Taylor appears as a stereotyped representation, and somewhere in his damaged psyche, he knows this. By playing out this role in front of the tourists, he is able deceive them into accepting his offers of help and consequential hospitality. He is like Dundee in that Dundee exaggerates his own experience with the crocodile in order to dupe the tourists into going out on one of his Never Never Safari tours. For Taylor it is all an act that will lead to betrayal, an act that, deep down, is just as funny as a girl trying to attack him with a Swiss Army Knife.
When Kirsty wakes up, Liz has not returned from her second foray into Mick’s camp. She maybe dead or she maybe being tortured, Kirsty isn’t sure. Instead of going to help, she decides to follow the last instructions given to her by Liz: to run away. Getting slowly to her feet, a battered and bloody Kirsty runs out into the landscape in the hope of finding a road. As the sun rises, Kirsty stumbles off the dry soil and onto warm tarmac. She is safe. Unable to run any further, she collapses to her knees. Breathing heavily, Kirsty looks around at the empty landscape and then down at her hands. Her bloody fingers are spread across the tarmac near the thickly painted white line that defines the edge of the road. On one side of this line is the outback, on its other side, the road. With its smooth and even surface, the road’s perfectly straight white line defines the oppositions of the narrative: urban versus nature, civilized versus primitive, and tourists versus Mick Taylor. Yet, regardless of the roads sense of permanence, its dramatic function changes as the film progresses.
At the start of the film, the (open) road offers the three travellers a means of fulfilling a romantic notion for its route is one of freedom, of solitude and of an escape into nature. By following its clearly defined course they can not only reach that other great wilderness, the Great Barrier Reef, but they can also witness other dramatic spectacles of nature along its solitary path. There is, ultimately, no need for a map because the road is the only black and white presence within the landscape – everything else is sun burnt into crisp strata of copper, silver and gold. As a result, the road is easy to follow, and it is also easy driving. As long as they keep on or close to its route, the road represents, in every sense, a site of safety. Now, near the end of film, as Kirsty studies her battered and bloody hands, the road is no longer a route to be followed but a path to potential freedom, one that will take her back to the safety of the modern. All she has to do is sit and wait and hope a car or truck will soon pass.
Within films of Wolf Creek’s type, the image of the Final Girl – battered, bruised and bloody – running down an empty road is becoming almost an archetypal image. Usually occurring near the end of the narrative (and when the audience believes the antagonist is dead or, at the very least, incapacitated), this image signifies the return to safety for the narratives one remaining survivor. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – a film to which Wolf Creek’s heritage belongs - the female survivor manages to escape from her captors out onto the road and into the back of truck. It is the same in Marcus Nispel’s 2003 remake of Chainsaw Massacre - and a similar ending occurs in Rob Zombie’s House of a 1000 Corpses (2003). But whereas in Hopper and Nispel’s films the girl manages to escape, the final girl of Zombie’s film is not so lucky. She is driven back to the horrors she has only just escaped from. For Kirsty a car does finally appear but it is only the briefest of salvation for Mick soon appears, executing both her and the anonymous driver of the vehicle.
The film’s final image is ambiguous. The sun is setting and the sky is once again filled with strata of gold. Mick Taylor walks into the frame, a silhouette against the sky, his trusted hunting rifle at his side, the bolt nearly worn down after all that murder. As he walks towards the horizon line he simply disappears. Taken literally, it implies that Mick Taylor has simply vanished or was never caught and died an anonymous death. The latter is a disturbing end for it implies that Mick continued to hunt the tourists that scrambles up to the top of Wolf Creek, accounting for some of those who go missing and are never found. But, putting such a realistic interpretation onto this image denies the sustained presence of the landscape within the film. Considering this, it is possible that Mick’s disappearance – or absorption – into the landscape implies a mythic resonance. He is no longer just an inhabitant; he is now part of the habitation, part of its memory and part of its myth. As long as the tourists keep traveling to see those natural wonders, he will remain.
Wolf Creek’s concluding image makes explicit the strong connection between McLean’s film and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: As Sally is driven to safety in the back of a truck, Leatherface, the films chainsaw wielding antagonist, remains behind, screaming as he spins his chainsaw wildly in the air. As he does, the sun slowly sets just as it does in Wolf Creek, the brilliant gold light bleaching out the image as Leatherface too dissolves back into the landscape.
Even with this connection aside, it is not difficult to make further parallels between Wolf Creek and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The consistency between the films indicates a heritage more than an extension or reinterpretation of Hopper’s film. Both films are set up as a ‘true’ story, as a means of amplifying the dreadful events that unfold and within reason both films share a similar narrative - a group of innocent young people travelling through the wilderness stumble upon an aberrant white male who proceeds to graphically slaughter them. The only real difference here is the choice of weapon, for both antagonists revel in not just the deception of trust but also the brutality of the torture they inflict upon the females of the group. The landscape is also used in a similar manner, functioning as a means of isolating the narratives protagonists and conceptually used to construct notions of opposition, of the relic and of the past.
In his essay The Idea of Apocalypse in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Christopher Sharrett considers the function of the landscape as a primitive space, stating that “the film is about a world dissolving into primordial chaos, set in an archetypal wasteland where the sustaining forces of civilization are not operative” (Sharrett, 1996: 259), and in relation to the ending, that “there is no comfortable sense of closure to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [, …] Hopper prefers to create crisis, to present the world returning to chaos” (Sharrett, 1996: 259). Within both films, the landscape represents Sharrett’s ‘primordial chaos’ and, because of this, its sense of timelessness is exaggerated for all of the attempts at civilization have failed. Within Wolf Creek this is given visual form in the ramshackle garage on the edge of the outback at Emu Creek, the consistently empty road, and the abandoned mine in which Mick Taylor has made his home - the attempts at civilizing this environment (or contaminating it with progress) become relics as they are rendered useless by the sheer force of the landscape. It is a space, as Sharrett describes, where the world has returned to chaos. This is in some ways ironic as for Mick Taylor nothing has changed as he simply continues to hunt the vermin that frequent Wolf Creek. Like Leatherface and his family, Mick’s homicidal activity is merely an extension of his relationship to the landscape: “I’m doing people a favour’” he says when Kristy asks him why he kills kangaroos. And perhaps he is. By killing the tourists that frequent Wolf Creek he is keeping this uncontaminated environment free of corruption and maintaining the delicate balance that each wilderness has. And, perhaps, that is why, in the end, Mick Taylor dissolves into the landscape: he is the balancing hand of the past, the sustained moment, the physical embodiment of chaos.
Endnotes