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The Monster Within: Australian Gothic emphasises the terror of the familiar

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The Monster Within: Australian Gothic emphasises the terror of the familiar

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This article is a great way to start if you have very little knowledge of the Australian Gothic style. It begins by speaking about the history and origin of this type of fiction and gives a timeline of when interest in the style peaked and also when interest in the style was lost. It gives a great description of what Australian Gothic Fiction really is and touches on how it is often about the monster within. It also mentions that “while traditional gothic novels and films emphasise the supernatural, Australian Gothic is not concerned with these themes in the obvious sense, rather emphasizing the terror of the familiar and the ordinary, which is a distinctly under-examined and under-utilized visual and narrative theme” This article is helpful if you get confused or mixed up with the difference between the gothic genre and the horror genre as it explains the key differences between the two.

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White-heritage Australians have been making films that can be identified as Australian Gothic (primarily a literary style rather than a genre) since the early 1970s, picking up where the rest of the world left off - particularly Americans, who languished in films like Rebecca (Hitchcock 1940) and the Euro influence of Frankenstein and Dracula, but who had incorporated the exhausted genre as a whole into horror films. Gothic as literature was big in the late 1700s but was being parodied by the start of the next century and started to lose its value. In the early 1900s with the advent of mainstream film making, there was a reignited interest in the styles of Gothic as genre, but that interest gave way to the advent of the horror film, a genre deemed to break open the boundaries of the gothic film and gothic novel. Since then, contemporary film gothic tends to be represented by films like Interview with the Vampire, the multiple Frankenstein films, Edward Scissorhands, Sweeny Todd and most other Tim Burton films.

However, examined via the literary tradition, Australians have been making a unique style of Gothic film since the 1970s and, seen through the tropes of the gothic novel, films that were first dismissed as rubbish or pretentious ( The Cars That Ate Paris, and The Night, The Prowler) become remarkable statements about the white Australian psyche. When the gothic novel first emerged in the mid-1700s it was a way to examine the unspoken, the sublimated fears as unexpressed motivators in the human psyche. Tropes of the gothic novel include: the depiction of a fallen world that impacts characterization, setting and theme; the wanderer in perpetual exile; and a journey to the sublime via human horror rather than temperance. Its ideas like this that gave birth to Frankenstein and Dracula, both entities very much connected to sex and (re)birth, death and loneliness, but also to the monster within, searching not for redemption but for a kind of beauty. In the case of the traditional gothic monster, he is a creature made from ourselves, our own psyches. Horror took this monster to the extreme, removing the subtleties and in the place of the relationship between terror/desire it emphasised the horrific death (fear) against sex itself and turned the monster into a completely inhuman force, determined on destruction and consumption. While horror was making its presence felt, Australians were quietly making films that, against trend, further absorbed and exemplified the monster within. The traditional gothic monster becomes what it was initially, an introverted sublimated impact of social forces on the psyche that operates through the wandering individual lost in a decaying world.

Peter Weir is the most obvious originator of the Australian Gothic, his more famous films of this period and genre being Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Cars That Ate Paris. Weir taps into the very uniquely white Australian problem of being a stranger in one's own land. White Australia has the psychic history of walking onto occupied land and claiming it, generating a feeling of great unease in our relationship with the physical earth in this country, and a strange unease with our identity as inheritors of European culture and displacers of Aboriginal heritage. Many cultures grapple with their historic crimes, but these films depict a specifically white Australian anxiety. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Cars That Ate Paris, the message is about the unknown spirit of the land that can take over the white, troubled psyche. Weir started this exploration in Homesdale (1971) about a group of people who go to a country "retreat" and play a series of "games" that are set up by the staff of the resort. Each day the games involve a confrontation with the ideas of death and mortality. The "weakest" among them succumbs to the psychological pressure and murders one of the guests. In the closing scenes of the film, we see that the murderer has now become one of the staff at Homesdale and will remain when the other guests leave. This is all very Freudian, where psychological rather than supernatural forces become the prime movers in worlds where the protagonists are sure of neither themselves nor their neighbor. In 1979 Weir made The Plumber, a psychological horror about an unnerving tradesman who invades a home via the bathroom, that place where the unmentionable happens and we rid ourselves of our own generated filth and waste. Summerfield (1977) by Ken Hannam deals with rural Australia and the sublimated strangeness of small towns.

Landscape is a recurring theme in many Australian films, but its malevolence is never as powerfully captured as in Australian Gothic. Horror films such as Wolf Creek and The Babadook use the landscape as an eerie film setting, but they retain the firm resolution that the monster is a thing outside. Even in a film like The Babadook that obviously references the three components of the psyche, the monster is still externalized, even among all the metaphor. Films like The Proposition and Gallipoli use the barren Australian landscape to indicate danger and an environment working against the intentions of the human walking upon it, but its impact is superficial, cosmetic. It's harsh, and barren. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, the landscape is a monster that can devour two girls and a school teacher so that they are never seen again. It subsequently causes the suicide of two more people at the school and implicitly deals with European ideals at odds with the spirit of this strangely foreign land.

Australian Gothic incorporates an examination of society and directly involves it in the deterioration of the protagonist wanderer, who will discover that they are terrifyingly alone. In The Cars That Ate Paris, it is society turned inward that is the gothic monster, but certain themes of Weir's tell us that the monster is not confined to Paris. The brilliant opening sequences depict a couple designed to appear as if in a commercial, until they are devoured by the malevolent behaviors in Paris. It's a remarkable prediction and condemnation of film product placement that will become the norm a decade or so later, as well as an attack on the surface of ideal that cinema creates. The speech given by the mayor of Paris at the ball mirrors the speech heard earlier in the car as the Waldo brothers listen to the Australian prime minister. The appearance at the ball of the lobotomised crash victims with cereal packets over their heads is a shocking scene, made all the more so by the applause of approval the citizens of Paris give at their entrance. The cars that ultimately destroy the town are driverless machine monsters that attack the town as by-product of its sleazy revenue. When Arthur is finally able to drive again and escape the town, his freedom comes from committing a horrific murder, and complying with the towns creed. Liberation comes from engagement in society and then a process of destruction, and is a key to the psychological nature of the gothic in Australian cinema.

Around this time, Jim Sharman (of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fame) made The Night, The Prowler, a superb example of Australian Gothic written by our own Nobel prize winner Patrick White. It's a brilliant film that was inappropriately dismissed by the critics as pretentious, and was therefore never given proper analytical examination. Felicity is a psychological stranger in the wealthy 1960s inner Sydney suburbs, constantly at odds with her environment and her hyper-realised conservative mother. Her mental deterioration after she is sexually assaulted firmly places her outside of the society her mother wants her to dominate, as she becomes a prowler herself, gradually taken over by the psychological and societal forces that wealthy society is engaged in a perpetual war against. The film uses flashbacks and other disjointed narrative devices to concentrate the feeling of unease but it is the performances of Ruth Cracknell and Kerry Walker, both obviously physically 'wrong' for their roles that brings home the perfect marriage between image as farce and unpleasant truth as an ignored surface tension.

This strain between the ugly and the ordinary is singular and exclusive to Australian Gothic films and the way they have of building the remarkable on the unremarkable. While traditional gothic novels and films emphasise the supernatural, Australian Gothic is not concerned with these themes in the obvious sense, rather emphasizing the terror of the familiar and the ordinary, which is a distinctly under-examined and under-utilized visual and narrative theme.. Where Czech films like The Ear (1970) evoke an eerie relationship with the home because of an externalized oppressive force listening in (communism), Australian cinema emphasizes the everyday nature of white culture as the gothic monster threatening to destabilize, in films like The Plumber (1979) where a very personal environment becomes unfamiliar and dangerous because it is so familiar.

More contemporary films that fall under this example of the Australian gothic are The Well (Samantha Lang 1997), Broken Highway (Laurie McInnes 1994) Bad Boy Bubby (Rolf de Heer 1994) and Dogwatch (Laurie McInnes 1999). Of these films, only Bad Boy Bubby was available for viewing in researching this article, despite my reading leading me to believe the others films are better examples of the Australian Gothic aesthetic. Dogwatch didn't even achieve theatrical release. Hopefully over time, "The Internet" (perhaps a new kind of gothic monster) will facilitate the freedom to view these fantastic Australian films, without the cringe-dominated distribution gatekeepers (controlled by our own refusal to spend money going to see these films) preventing us, so that a proper examination of this under-evaluated style of filmmaking can be further examined. If ever there was a clarion call in Australian arts, it should be to get over our fear of the pretentious, grow up and thoroughly examine our work for what it is - a unique and powerful contribution to the global creative voice.
References:
David Thomas with Garry Gillard - Ten Types of Australian Film Chapter 9: Gothic (2009)
Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka - The Screening of Australia Volume 2: Anatomy of a National Cinema (Currency Press, 2000)

Note: The two references above were instrumental in creating this paper and both expand on the brief analysis in this article, though the opinions expressed in this piece are my own.

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The Monster Within: Australian Gothic emphasises the terror of the familiar / Essential Down Under / The Essential

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White-heritage Australians have been making films that can be identified as Australian Gothic (primarily a literary style rather than a genre) since the early 1970s, picking up where the rest of the world left off - particularly Americans, who languished in films like Rebecca (Hitchcock 1940) and the Euro influence of Frankenstein and Dracula, but who had incorporated the exhausted genre as a whole into horror films. Gothic as literature was big in the late 1700s but was being parodied by the start of the next century and started to lose its value.

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Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction

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Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction

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This article is all about exploring what exactly goes into an Australian Gothic story. It delves deeper into the “sense of discomfort, of being unwholesome, resulting from breaking social taboos; overwhelming darkness, hopelessness, claustrophobia, and disintegration” that are often depicted in these types of stories. It also does a great job at describing the kind of landscapes and settings Australian Gothic fiction takes place in, which is usually “harsh and unforgiving and over it all hangs an endless, suffocating sky.” It is unsettling, eerie and mysterious and this article is able to create a real sense of this uncanniness. Further in to the article, the author draws on quotes from many real Australian Gothic stories which gives an additional insight into what Australian Gothic fiction is really about and once again helps paint a great picture of the types of settings.

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In her introduction to Australis Imaginarium (2010), Tehani Wessely succinctly summarises an idea that has become something of a truism when it comes to discussing horror and dark fantasy stories with Australian settings:

There's simply something about the vastness of this land and the many weird, wild and dangerous creatures that populate it that lends itself to terrifying tales.

Looking at Australian short fiction published in recent years, we can see exactly what Wessely means. These stories are riddled with manifestations of 'Australian Gothic'. Many of them depict rural isolation: people alone in the desert, in the bush, by the sea. Underlining human and supernatural threats is nature itself, harsh and unforgiving; over it all hangs an endless, suffocating sky. The settings in these narratives are more than just unsettling or uncanny; there's an unheimlich quality to this country's wilderness, which makes it clear that most characters - human or otherwise - are unwelcome. Leave, they seem to say. You don't belong here.

When we think of Gothic literature - Australian or otherwise - several themes or features immediately come to mind: ghosts from the past (literal and metaphorical) rising up to oppress the stories' protagonists; a sense of discomfort, of being unwholesome, resulting from breaking social taboos; overwhelming darkness, hopelessness, claustrophobia, and disintegration. Australia's colonial/convict history is an obvious source of inspiration for this type of horror - but there are so many Australian Gothic stories set in the colonial period that we'll have to save discussing them for another time. Instead, I want to focus on stories that feature 'the vastness of this land' - either as a backdrop to dark short stories, or as a fundamental part of the horror itself.

In Sue Isle's 'The Painted Girl' (Nightsiders), we get the impression that nature is obliterating the past as well as shaping the present. Bushfires rage in this story's opening, ravaging the landscape and making it indistinguishable from Australia as we currently know it. At the same time, fire is a controlling force: it shepherds the characters, driving them inward, making them run. Bushfires function in a similar way in my story 'White and Red in the Black' (Dead Red Heart); burning-earth fences the characters in, keeping them contained, terrified within the confines of their homestead.In Paul Haines' 'The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt' (The Last Days of Kali Yuga), we don't see the fire itself, but its smoke. Like a bell jar descending on the city, a grey pall echoes the protagonist's increasingly dark thoughts, enhancing the sense that he's being stifled, suffocating in his life.

Drought, like fire, often turns the land to dust in these Australian stories, obliterating the past and making the future look bleak. After offering glimpses of scorched, otherworldly trees and black earth, the final lines of Sean William's poem 'Parched' (Sprawl) are a haunting refrain, and a promise of worse to come: "it never rains / for long / here." And in 'Virgin Jackson' (Australis Imaginarium) Marianne de Pierres takes us to an inhospitable, not-so-distant time in the future, where hot north-east winds "evaporated the fluid from your body in seconds" and "scoured the wayback into grotesque landforms, sharp gullies and dust ball plains." Images of dusty, desert (and deserted) plains feature most prominently in these short stories: often cast in shades of sunset, representations of the country's red heart seem to be used as shorthand for the wide open fear of the Australian landscape.

The dangers inherent in the desert are usually referred to within the first few pages - and often in the first paragraph - of these tales. Not just to set the scene; these descriptions instantly add a horrific tone to each piece, to suggest that things can only get worse in what's to follow. For example, Jason Fischer opens 'Undead Camels Ate Their Flesh' (Dreaming Again) like so:

With its usual efficiency, the sun blazed down on bugger-all. It was the Outback, with nothing for hundreds of miles but heat, dust and flies.

This offers a bleak, uncompromising picture of Australia, much like the first lines of Joanna Fay's 'Black Heart' (Dead Red Heart):

It was time to die. That was why she'd come here, to the red land. The sky swept over here, horizon to horizon, uncompromising scarlet. The colour of her unlife, like the sands stretched wide to meet it.

Likewise, Dirk Strasser's 'The Dark Under the Sun' (Australis Imaginarium) captures the feeling that this is not a place where life thrives:

There was red flatness as far as he could see, like a fire that had been trampled to death by a thousand feet, but which had somehow managed to keep its heat while its flames had been killed. Out of the heat grew clumps of grass and twisted, black-bodied trees, but they were so few and far between that it was as if rather than being in the process of living, they were in the process of dying.

Even when the stories take place after dark, the sun, the desert and its denizens are treated as pervasive, immediate concerns. Though sunset brings with it cooler temperatures, in 'Sun Falls' (Dead Red Heart) Angela Slatter reminds us of "the sounds of the night: cicadas, possums, snakes, lizards, hares, wallabies. All manner of nasties that don't come out in the sunlight." While Slatter's story cuts with black humour, Alan Baxter's 'Punishment of the Sun' ) adds a more melancholy edge to the land after sunset. Baxter describes a "world beyond stygian and dead" with "dry, dusty paddocks with dry, dusty horses, ribs like xylophone keys through thin, scabby hides. The orange desolation dragged on as far as hope would last in every direction. Too young to leave this desiccated hole, [Annie] grudgingly endured." This notion of Australia as a 'Hell' or a 'hole' to be endured is also present in the opening paragraph of Pete Kempshall's 'Signature Walk' (Sprawl), in which a little girl asks:

'Where's Australia, Granddad?' ... He held her gaze and pointed straight down at the ground. She shook her head. 'No, Granddad, you're wrong ... Australia can't be down there,' said the girl with absolute assurance. 'That's where Hell is.'

Marty Young also draws on hellish imagery to set the 'horror' tone of his story, 'Desert Blood' (Dead Red Heart):

The world began to bleed as the sun melted into the horizon. Hell was leaking, its blood seeping up from the sand and the sunset itself to reflect in the slow moving Cooper Creek next to them.

The sun setting over expanses of red sand lends itself to plenty of lovely Gothic imagery: crumbling buildings in silhouette, darkness limned with blood and crimson wastelands. However, the Australian sky is perhaps at its most frightening, its most suffocating, during daylight hours. "The sky was blue as a vein the day I killed my father," begins Stephen M Irwin's 'Hive' (Macabre), but it "wouldn't stay that way; the strange, ice-fire blue eventually gave way to eerie grey, then to the red of sick blood." The sky's disintegration from brightness to blood foreshadows the young protagonist's psychological turmoil, his vivid dreams and descent into a sort of temporary madness. Moreover, it reflects Michael's very personal horror. By contrast, the sky in Sean Williams' 'Passing the Bone' (Australis Imaginarium) is "a blue sheet pressing down on the world" that seems designed to stifle everyone, like a pillow pressed over the face. The vastness of the Australian wilderness is contained only by leaves and sky in Margo Lanagan's 'Pig's Whisper' (Agog! Ripping Reads)

The bush was vast around them, immense above them; its frail roof of leaves was a sky within a sky.

Out here, the children are frightfully exposed; they are plunged into Australian lore, and must figure their own way out.

Two stories published in recent years are standouts, in my opinion, for integrating characters and their plights from the world in which they exist. The first is 'Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn' (Dreaming Again) by Jason Nahrung. This piece marks its territory by describing dusty red land, but where many of the examples I've given above use Australia's unforgiving climate and its deserts as a backdrop to the action, this piece's setting is integral in conveying the weariness, exhaustion, and wonderful bleakness that are driving forces in the plot:

George stood by the bleached skeleton of the Wyandra stockyards, breathing in dust and sun-baked silence. The rust-red roofs of the township shimmered in the heat haze, and from what he could see, his old stomping ground hadn't fared much better than he had in the past twenty years: tired, forlorn, running out of time.

This is Australian Gothic. Hopelessness and the certainty of defeat right from the word go. A relentless sense of doom ingrained in the very dirt. And the characters forging on, regardless. A similar effect is achieved in Nahrung's 'Wraiths' ( Winds of Change); there is a feeling of not-quite-acceptance, a stoic weariness in the face of 'natural' threats, established right from the first paragraph:

The dust wraiths struck with all the speed and surprise and finality of a slamming door. We should've felt it coming, but we didn't. Maybe it was the heat, dulling our senses with its touch of lazy. Maybe it was just our time and, on some level, down deep, we knew it and ignored the signs. Or maybe they'd just got tired of us and decided to end it, once and for all.

Heat, dust, sun and desert are embodied in Nahrung's characterisations; these people are the landscape, and its chilling horrors, personified - you can practically hear red dust grinding between their teeth, in their bones - which makes this authors' stories essential reading for anyone interested in Australian horror.

The second piece that shouldn't be missed is Paul Haines' 'Burning from the Inside' (The Last Days of Kali Yuga). Although this story is mostly set in Adelaide - it integrates city settings with the more iconic 'sunburnt country' imagery - it captures the spirit of Australian horror in an absolutely chilling way. In Haines' fiction, setting is never a trope or a cheap add-on. And in this piece in particular, it's impossible to separate the protagonist from his surroundings. From the first line, we're given insight into his mindset, and how Adelaide has helped to shape it:

I'd like to say I feel unsettled here, but I don't.

Right away, we learn that this setting is something we should be afraid of, something we should feel unsettled by. At the same time, this line immediately hooks us into the true point of the story: this city, this setting, can be unforgiving and scary, but it is the protagonist's perception of Adelaide - and his being so at home in this place - that makes us shudder to the core.

From my hotel room I can see the river Torrens snaking through the park, the lush of leaf in contrast to the desert sands that lap at the shoreline this city makes. The sun is settling on the horizon, finally a thing of beauty rather than the raging father in the sky, now its urgency is almost spent. One can imagine the river, that gurgle of water, a searing temptation for the heat bursting forth from the dead heart of this red island continent. A thirst to be quenched? Or something to be destroyed, the last bastion of hope holding back the inevitable conquest that shapes this dry land? Ornate spires reach for the heavens, dozens of them, over trees, nestled between crossroads and office buildings, the cross of Christ thrust up bold and true. One only has to glance in any direction to find the house of God here. From this spot alone I spy the Holy Trinity, Scots, St Patrick's, St Peter's, Christ's, Brougham Place and Immanuel. And here I am. In the City of Churches. Adelaide. My new home for the foreseeable future. The murder capital of Australia.

There are so many contrasts, so much tension in this paragraph alone: city/country, drought/drowning, heaven/hell, life/death, past/present; it is a complex and disturbing sketch of the city, and the land surrounding it. In this story, more than any other, the setting - with its deadly creatures, ruthless atmosphere and horrific history - possesses the main character. It haunts and inhabits him. It tears him apart even as it gives him purpose. It will not leave him alone.

This is Australian horror. And it is absolutely terrifying.
LISA L HANNETT If you enjoyed Lisa L Hannett's column, please consider clicking through to our Amazon Affiliate links and buying her fiction. If you do you'll help keep the This Is Horror ship afloat with a very welcome slice of remuneration.
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Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction

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In her introduction to Australis Imaginarium (2010), Tehani Wessely succinctly summarises an idea that has become something of a truism when it comes to discussing horror and dark fantasy stories with Australian settings: There's simply something about the vastness of this land and the many weird, wild and dangerous creatures that populate it that lends itself to terrifying tales.

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This research paper is an extremely in depth look at Australian Gothic fiction. It begins by describing how the style came to be so popular in Australia and explains that British colonialization was a big factor. The author said that “long before the fact of Australia was ever confirmed by explorers and cartographers it had already been imagined as a grotesque space, a land peopled by monsters” and that when settlers arrived there was nothing but a vast, eerie landscape, which only added to the image of Australia they already had. He then goes on to detail many other reasons for the genre’s popularity in Australia until he begins to talk about the very first examples of Australian Gothic fiction from the 1800s. This is a great article if you want to learn all about the history of the Australian Gothic style.

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Video: Neil Gaiman on horror versus gothic

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Video: Neil Gaiman on horror versus gothic

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This a video of author Neil Gaiman talking about what he thinks the difference between the horror genre and the gothic genre are. He explains that the goal of horror is to scare you, but gothic fiction is all about the mood. Gaiman said that in gothic fiction “the mood is misty. Things are ominous. Things move very slowly. The idea is you are dislocating the world that the person viewing it is living in and taking them to somewhere subtly more menacing.” He is able to explain very eloquently, how in horror movies it’s often all about the violence, but the gothic world has violence that is found in the undertones and the tension, not violence that is explicitly shown. This video is great if you tend to get mixed up with the two genres or if you didn’t know there was a difference between the two.

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If you want a quick, basic summary of the Australian Gothic style, this is the article to go to. This site believe that the purpose of Australian Gothic fiction is ‘generally to rouse fear, apprehension and other intense emotions within the reader’It is also great for someone who loves theatre as it has a focus geared towards Australian Gothic plays. If you prefer to learn from example rather than just reading, this site gives you a long list of Australian Gothic plays. You can scan over the summary of some of the plays to get a rough idea of what the genre consists of. These examples that are provided are good if you want to use them to help draw off your own knowledge in order to recognise what Australian Gothic fiction is.

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Australian Gothic Drama is an exhilarating and disturbing style which explores the uniquely Australian spectre of our history or identity, or as the playwright, Stephen Carleton, puts it, "Our history haunts us and the land we live upon".