Digging up the history of Australian horror cinema: Delineating transnational-horror, Ozploitation and Australian Gothic movies from the 1970s to now

Since the early 1970s, Australian cinema has produced a distinct and enduring tradition of horror cinema. Australian horror cinema has been heavily influenced by international film cycles and Australia has produced numerous movies from Turkey Shoot (1982) to Daybreakers (2009) that are produced for international markets and have a transnational textual identity that largely eschew national textual identifiers. Conversely, many Australian horror movies with a distinct cultural accent have revolved around stories of terror in outback or rural settings, and a leitmotif at the core of Australian horror cinema has been the struggle for survival in a dangerous and primordial landscape. Yet, despite growing scholarly interest in the subject, the impurity of the genre’s development since the 1970s remains unclear. Consequently, scholarship is yet to reconcile how culturally-relevant generic tropes and conventions at the core of a nationally-defined tradition have developed in relation to more transnational aesthetic developments and how this relates to debates around Ozploitation and the Australian Gothic. This paper presents research conducted for the 2018 AFI Research Collection Fellowship: it provides insight into the development of dominant thematic concerns and generic conventions between 1970 and 1999 and considers the impurity of the genre’s development during this period.