Not Welcome: Writing Horror in Australia S.P. Krause A feature film screenplay and exegesis submitted for the requirements of the Master of Arts (Research). Faculty of Creative Industries Queensland University of Technology 2005 ii Keywords Producers, Projects, Writing, Pitching, Drama, Screenplay, Horror. iii iv Abstract “Not Welcome” is a thesis containing an original dark genre screenplay called Acolytes and an exegesis called “Not Welcome”: Writing Horror in Australia. The screenplay is about two boys, victims of years of bullying, who find a way to rid themselves of their bully for good, exchanging one problem for something much worse. But it’s an elaborate and calculated lie. The truth is Acolytes is about the concealment of a crime and not the vengeance of a victim. Acolytes is intentionally moody, oppressive and obtuse—it has a true crime-scene ambience. The power of the story lies in its truth— the truth that it seeks to uncover and the truth of the style of its telling—and, just as is the case with real-life crime, the “truth” is often murky and far from clear-cut. The accompanying exegesis explores the domestic funding and production climate for dark genre projects. It argues that Australian genre scriptwriters and filmmakers have often faced hostile funding agencies and genre-timid producers. It examines the requirements of dark genre scriptwriters and filmmakers in bringing their work from page to screen. It argues that the onus is on Australian dark genre writers and filmmakers to think beyond funding agencies and institutionalised Australian producers to realise their projects. v vi Table of Contents Keywords iii Abstract v Statement of Original Authorship ix Acknowledgements xi Not Welcome: Writing Horror in Australia 1 Introduction 2 Horror and Sci-Fi Will Not Be Considered 5 Review of Context and Literature 9 Screenplay: Acolytes 21 Case Studies: Kraal and Acolytes 164 Conclusion 186 Bibliography 190 Filmography 192 vii viii Statement of Original Authorship The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made. Signature:________________________________ Date:____________________________________ ix x Acknowledgements Thanks to Shayne Armstrong, a staunch passenger in pain. Thanks a heap also to Stuart Glover, Gerard Lee, Lachlan Madsen and Steve Waugh. xi xii “Not Welcome”: Writing Horror in Australia 1 Introduction: On 4 May 1982, two off-duty soldiers from Enoggera Barracks picked up two thirteen year-old boys hitchhiking on the Gold Coast Highway. They took them to remote bushland and murdered one boy after torturing him for hours. They were creative about it. They sliced holes in his ears with a leather punch and cut his pubic hair off, forcing his friend to eat it. Then they made him eat sand. They also played a version of piggy-in-the-middle with knives, stabbing and slashing the boy as they pushed him back and forth. When they were sick of these games, they urinated on him, partially scalped him, then buried him alive. For reasons only known to themselves, they drove the other boy home. I was thirteen years-old when I heard this. I didn’t know all the details then—I’ve since researched it—but what I did know genuinely haunted me. At thirteen I’d already read about concentration camps and killing fields but this sort of stuff didn’t happen in Australia—I hadn’t yet read about the Beaumont Children. But the torture and murder of a Queensland boy exactly my age was too close to home. I made connections. One of my father’s best mates was stationed at Enoggera Barracks and we had spent some bland Sundays there with his smart-arse kids. The highway the two boys were snatched from was the same one we used every year for our two-week holiday at Surfers Paradise. In 1981 “Dream World” was a new theme park and just about the greatest thing I’d ever seen. My old man took us there on the Christmas holidays that year and we ran amok. Like most theme parks it has a sprawling car park at the front of it. Six months later this was where the two men stopped briefly to handcuff the boys to their seats. They are loose connections but were strong and real enough in my thirteen year-old mind to put me inside the car and in the bushland with Terry Ryan and Peter Aston. I imagined it all. This is partly where Acolytes came from. Years later, I was introduced to the artwork of Frederick McCubbin and the quirks of a West Australian couple called the Birnies. They both made an impression. It was a couple of Frederick McCubbin paintings that got the script started. What I responded 2 to in McCubbin was his attitude toward the Australian landscape. It’s the same bleak one that Henry Lawson wrote about and Banjo Patterson romanticized to become a star. Bad things happen in McCubbin’s country. Little girls and boys wander off from picnics and perish, family members, most likely children, die on the way to new and remote homes. Prints of Bush Burial and the two Lost paintings hung over my computer for the duration of the writing. In my opinion, he’s one of a handful of Australian painters good enough to steal from. The other thing I like about McCubbin is that his images come with a truckload of story and mystery. You could extrapolate entire scripts from some of his pictures and in my own way I did. The Birnies, on the other hand, are not to be admired but have contributed indelibly to Acolytes. In 1986, over a five-week period, David and Catherine Birnie abducted, raped, tortured and murdered four women at their suburban home in Perth. They would have kept on going but their latest “guest” escaped and walked naked to a local shopping centre where she told police her story. The Birnies were husband and wife “Tandem Killers”. It’s an uncommon dynamic anywhere else in the world except for Australia. Private Paul Luckman and Corporal Robin Reid (the two soldiers who murdered 13 year-old Peter Aston) were same sex tandem killers but like the Birnies, and most other tandem killers, they share similar profiles. One is dominant, the other submissive. But that doesn’t mean the submissive partner derives no pleasure from forced sexual acts and the infliction of pain and death. Catherine Birnie and Private Paul Luckman enjoyed themselves. In Acolytes, the Birnies, Luckman and Reid, were the touchstone for my Ian and Kay Wright. The whole miserable lot of them have worried me since the start of my teens. But at the same time I’m fascinated with them. I’ve tried to get to the bottom of how they’re able to hurt and kill for their own brief pleasure but I’ve never gotten far. It would worry me if I did. I don’t understand them and I don’t know what creates them. Maybe there’s a switch in their minds that turns itself off. Acolytes is the first time I’ve written about them. But Acolytes springs just as much from American suburban nightmares such as Arlington Road (1999, Mark Pellington), River’s Edge (1986, Tim Hunter), Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly) and Apt Pupil (1998, Bryan Singer). These films, at least 3 to me, have a strong European sensibility as do my favourite Australian films since the revival—Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975, Weir’s high profile heist of the Box Hill painters), The Devil’s Playground (1976, Fred Schepisi), Year My Voice Broke (1987, John Duigan). Some great Australian directors have made their careers from co-opting a European sensibility and in the process created Australian cinema. What this European sensibility means for me is not treating the audience like children. It’s not about wish fulfillment, good versus evil, easy answers and solutions. Order is not restored. Everything is not going to be all right. Bad guys are not slapped in handcuffs and punishment isn’t prison but inside minds and hearts. These are stories for grownups. 4 “Horror and Sci-Fi Will Not Be Considered” Strangely, for a country that has produced world-class maniacs like Martin Bryant and Ivan Milat, Australia does not have a rich history in horror filmmaking. Contrary to those accounts which sees violence in part produced by exposure to violent cultural artifacts including films, our real-life maniacs appear not to be influenced or encouraged by our horror movies since there have been few of them to be influenced by. The Australian film industry has, however, coughed up a handful of horror films, most during the 10BA tax rebate period, where producers broke their leashes from funding agencies and made the kinds of movies they wanted to see or they felt they could sell. As Tom O’Regan observes: Government corporations had once set the production agenda through their selection of what to invest in. Under the new conditions private enterprise set the agenda. This ensured that the logic of the film marketplace would encourage commercially- orientated investment. (p.119) With the roll back of 10BA—to a point where it became irrelevant to investors— government film funding bodies reclaimed significant control of what Australians filmmakers are permitted to make and the stories they are allowed to tell. With the Film Finance Corporation’s recent restructuring and its commissioning of two internal assessment officers (both from an art house background) it is now even more unlikely that an honest dark genre project will gain entry.