Haunting film with a twist
A LOVE of Casper the Friendly Ghost as a child led to a fascination with ghost stories, but the spectre in Deakin University’s filmmaker Donna McRae’s latest feature is not so friendly.
As the young girl walks, step by step, through the dark hallway, her pale face illuminated only by the light from the camp lantern in her hand, the audience holds a collective breath. And then everything is black…
The teaser for Dr McRae’s Lost Gully Road is barely 30 seconds long, but it’s enough to set the scene for a story that combines the best of traditional horror movie moments with a searing examination of society’s attitudes towards violence against women.
Lucy (Adele Perovic of ABCTV’s The Code) is staying in a cottage in the middle of the bush, hiding from someone who wants to harm her. However, her sanctuary conceals other, hidden threats.
Reviewers describe Lost Gully Road — which screened at Perth’s Revelation International Film Festival earlier this month and was nominated for Best Original Score (Dave Graney and Claire Moore) at April’s Ozflix Independent Film Awards — as a slow burning “bush gothic tale” and “the most original and powerful Australian haunted house film in years”.
The film’s next screening is at Nova Cinemas in Carlton on Tuesday.
Gothic ghost stories have long been Dr McRae’s film making forte. Her PhD, ‘Projecting Phantasy: The Spectre in Cinema’ was followed by the award-winning feature Johnny Ghost and her next project is a ghostly revisionist version of the life of Kate Kelly, sister of the infamous Ned. She also cowrote and directed the recent documentary, Cobby: The Other Side of Cute.
“I’m interested in the Australian gothic, especially the Australian female gothic. It’s about women in a particular landscape and that landscape could be an interior one, like in Johnny Ghost or an exterior one, like the bush and cottage in Lost Gully Road,” Dr McRae said.
“The thing that’s really interesting about making a ghost film is working out what the ghost represents in the story. It could be memory or it could be another side of the same person.”
While Dr McRae describes the ghost in Johnny Ghost as “something that was haunting the character from her past,” she took a different approach when writing Lost Gully Road with long-time collaborator Michael Vale, who was also the film’s production designer.
“I wanted to place the ghost externally, so there was something that might actually engage with the character physically, and at the same time create a response to the appalling violence against women that was in the news at the time, and still is,” she said.
Dr McRae said horror films were often viewed through the perspective of the male gaze and, while there are a lot of strong women in the genre, others are simply objectified.
“Through the female gaze I wanted to portray a woman who is just normal; she’s a millennial, she’s not good, she’s not bad, she’s just her,” she said. For more information and tickets, visit www.cinemanova.com.au/ films/lost-gully-road.