Australian Gothic , livre ebook

AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC
AG.indd 1 16/05/2022 16:41:32SERIES PREFACE
Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking
scholarship on Gothic in literature and flm. The Gothic, which has
been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is
a form which plays an important role in our understanding of
literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote
challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question
any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy.
Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion,
nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition.
Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest
developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for
scholarly developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural
studies and cry. The series will be of interest to students
of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary
and cultural histories.
SERIES EDITORS
Andrew Smith, University of Shefeld
Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi
EDITORIAL BOARD
Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts
Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia
David Punter, University of Bristol
Chris Baldick, University of London
Angela Wright, University of Shefeld
Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
For all titles in the Gothic Literary Studies series
visit www.uwp.co.uk
AG.indd 2 16/05/2022 16:41:32Australian Gothic
A Cinema of Horrors
Jonathan Rayner
UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS
2022
AG.indd 3 16/05/2022 16:41:33© Jonathan Rayner, 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material
form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic
means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of
this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner
except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission
to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the
University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue,
Cardif CF10 3NS.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78683-889-6
eISBN 978-1-78683-890-2
The right of Jonathan Rayner to be identifed as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset by Marie Doherty
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham, United Kingdom
AG.indd 4 16/05/2022 16:41:33This book is dedicated to Bryan Burns,
and the fallacy of the Self-Assembly Chair.
AG.indd 5 16/05/2022 16:41:33Writing pages:Layout 1 23/6/09 13:39 Page 291Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Introduction 1
1 Familiarity47
2 Monstrosity95
3 Hybridity 143
4 Sublimity 191
Conclusion: A National Cinema of Horrors 239
Filmography 253
Bibliography273
Index287
AG.indd 7 16/05/2022 16:41:33Writing pages:Layout 1 23/6/09 13:39 Page 291List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Hoon Perversity Challenge: Wolf Creek 2 22
Figure 2. Sock-Horror: Dying Breed 35
Figure 3. ‘Am I too outspoken?’: The Loved Ones 64
Figure 4. Bedtime Story: The Babadook87
Figure 5. ‘Warning to Travellers’: Wolf Creek 121
Figure 6. ‘Gungilee means weeping’: Killing Ground130
Figure 7. ‘So lucky to be single’: Lost Gully Road 161
Figure 8. The landscape is a map: Mystery Road176
Figure 9. ‘Waiting a million years’: Picnic at Hanging Rock 211
Figure 10. The sublime road: Mad Max 219
Figure 11. The historical crime scene: Primal246
AG.indd 9 16/05/2022 16:41:33Writing pages:Layout 1 23/6/09 13:39 Page 291Introduction

‘Australian Gothic Cinema’, Question Mark
This book sets out to collate, address, analyse and interpret
recurring, interlocking and readable currents, trends and tropes that have
emerged within Australian horror flms since the 1970s. Diferently
defned and discerned characteristics gathered under the
appellation of ‘Australian Gothic’ have been used to distinguish signifcant
and persistent themes, narratives and images within contemporary
Australian flmmaking. As a term applied widely and repeatedly
to diverse examples of Australian cinema, which arguably
represent instances of a variety of more discrete genres or recognisable
‘flm types’, the label of ‘Australian Gothic’ has been employed,
explored, championed and challenged in critical responses across
1several decades of Australian flmmaking. The regular harnessing
of this term has gone hand in hand not simply with the
questioning of its appropriateness, but also with an implicit or explicit
probing of its defnition. The application of the term ‘Gothic’ to
Australian flms has evinced a fuidity equal to its frequency. It has
inferred a cohesiveness belying critical controversies around it,
its place within an evaluation of the commercial and cultural
profle of Australian flms and accruing around the role and
importance of the national cinema itself. Repeated application
and acceptance of ‘Australian Gothic’ as a category has nonetheless
AG.indd 1 16/05/2022 16:41:33Australian Gothic: A Cinema of Horrors
left open to productive debate what exactly is Gothic and indeed
Australian about these flms.
While the pertinent application of the term ‘Gothic’ to Australian
cinema begins with the near-term retrospective responses of the
1980s to examples of renewed flm production in the 1970s, its
continuance (as well as its continual reappraisal) sets it apart from
what might otherwise be comparable appellations and occurrences
in other national cinemas. Gothic cycles in, for example, British and
Italian cinema have been more historically and critically localised to
fewer, specifc decades. Barry Forshaw’s account of Gothic
manifestations in British cinema concentrates on the meanings behind the
convergence of specifc literary and cinematic traditions of national
horror: the Gothic literary precedents of Mary Shelley and Bram
Stoker, and the adaptation, extension and recapitulation of the
characters, themes and tropes of their narratives in (above all) the flms
2produced by the Hammer studio in the 1950s and 1960s. For
Forshaw, it is Hammer’s ‘imaginative (and, for the time, sensational)
reinvention of Gothic material’ that epitomises a determinedly
commercial, populist and chronologically contained version of national
3genre flmmaking. The post-war establishment’s negative reaction
to the coalescence and commercial success of this British version of
‘refulgently coloured horror and carnality’ is, for Forshaw, identical
to the censorious contemporary response to novelistic horror in
4the ‘romantic strain’ of eighteenth-century literatur A cater e. ing
to popular taste and a confrontation with censorship are the
common characteristics, rather than any interpretable comparison in
their cultural moments (although literary and cinematic examples
appeared in both cases in the aftermaths of European social
disruption, large-scale war and political change). This suggests that the
Gothic surges and resurges particularly during cultural shifts and
upheavals, and functions to refect them.
This currency of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic
literature in British cinema produces a signifcant synergy with
the case of Australian Gothic, and aspects of cultural and national
identity. Jane Stadler notes how ‘Gothic narratives followed
colonial expansion’ and that ‘the period during which Gothic novels
were most popular coincided with the colonisation of Australia
5in 1788 and convict transportation through the 1860s’. Gothic
2
AG.indd 2 16/05/2022 16:41:33Introduction
literature is not only contemporary with the founding of Australia,
as a tone and perspective it is also ‘transported’, resettled a-nd unset
tled in the colony, where its probing of the uncanny encountered
in human society and the natural landscape acquired new materials
and renewed relevance. The character and consequences of
colonialera encounters with the Australian continent and landscape have
meant that, as Ken Gelder has observed, the ‘imported genre’ of the
Gothic in literary and visual terms has proved adept in ‘adjusting’
6to (and articulating) ‘local predicaments’. These ‘predicaments’ can
be summarised as being principally inspired by or arising from the
‘apparent emptiness’ of the Australian landscape, which challenged
colonial endeavours of exploration and settlement, and confronted
both wider cultural shortcomings and personal, individual faws,
paradoxically ‘bringing endless wide-open space and the
claus7trophobia of confnement uncannily together’. The Australian
landscape’s potential for occurrences of the sublime, and its
inevitable description as ‘uncanny’ (residing in its diference from northern
hemisphere environments and its apparent inhospitableness and
indiference to the colonial enterprise), acknowledges the aptness of
horrifed responses to the Australian environment. The continent’s
alien and alienating physical geography, the colonists’ circumstances
of willing and unwilling transportation to it, and the contradictions
of their literal and metaphorical confnement within its measureless
expanses, work to mobilise a Gothic vocabulary of psychological
and sublime extremity. Running counter to a colonial,
proprietorial and rationalising view of the land as tameable, negotiable and
exploitable, a contemporary and continuing Australian Gothic
literary response to the land suggests the subversion of this perspective
in its being unreasonable and unnavigable in and as nature, evincing
not patriarchal control and proft, but instead precipitating personal,
existential and cultural crises. Assertive narratives of settlement and
8con