The Idea

The idea came about by a combination of three major things.

First off, I'd finished film school but my final project had gone quite bad and I didn't really have a film that I could show with any confidence. So I wanted to make another, but I'd spent my savings at school, so this one had to be very low budjet.

Second, I really wanted to make a film for Trasharama as I'd been to the festival in 2008 and really enjoyed the event. However, I get a bit put off by the amount of bad, slasher, low grade, zombie, horror films that are constantly being made and didn't want to go down that path. At least, not at film school. There seems to be, at least one Zombie feature a year, being made in Melbourne somewhere. They are always made for no money with an expectation that they'll make everyone rich and famous. I think that comes from George A Romero kicking off the whole genre with the Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Its such an easy thing to do but I wanted to do something different.

Third, I saw the documentary, Not Quite Hollywood, which had the director of the doco and Brian Trenchad-Smith (director of Turkey Shoot, The Man from Hong Kong) come out and give a talk after. The doco talked about the TBA tax era of Australian cinema and focused a lot on the horror and Ozploitation(I think the doco coined the term) films of the 70's and 80's. One of the films that was often criticised, or alluded to at least, was Picnic at Hanging Rock.

So I wanted to make a cheap film, I wanted it to have some gore and I wanted it to be like an Ozploitation flic and driving past Hanging Rock on the way to Castlemaine the idea came to me.