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Australian horror

These two words have different connotations for many people worldwide.

Australian horror has exploited fears of Australia’s ‘wide-open spaces’, and the isolation and vulnerability of people where the population drops to less than fifty individuals per square kilometre. Wolf Creek and Snowtown are based on real-life crimes such as Ivan Milat’s ‘backpacker murders’, or the murders in Snowtown last decade. The desolation of much of the Australian landscape, and the vulnerability of those within these areas, has been driven home both by crimes of opportunity and well-planned killing sprees. This is the horror of Australia in reality.

For many overseas residents, it seems Australia has a reputation as the home of many things that have no other aim in life but to kill humans in very nasty ways. Crocodiles, poisonous snakes and spiders, serial killers, giant insects, deadly jellyfish, shark attacks, drop-bears… the list goes on.

See the whole column HERE: A short history of Australian horror » This Is Horror.