As Antipodean horror films continue to make their presence felt at Frightfest; our man down under David Michael Brown goes walkabout with giant crocs and outback killers to bring you the latest Aussie horror news.
 

24th December 2007.

As the year comes to an end things normally slow down into a soporific blur of turkey, booze and Santa, however, when it comes to exciting announcements the final weeks of 2007 have thrown up some interesting Antipodean announcements, many of which will be of great interest to your average FrightFester.

The Film Finance Corporation of Australia have just approved a whopping 22 projects to fund in their final announcement of the year generating AUS$72.94 million worth of production in film, television drama and documentary projects. Not normally known for their acceptance of any genre picture, let alone horror so it’s encouraging to see they are backing a new Aussie/ British co- production and a horror film no less. Triangle is a psychological thriller set inside the Bermuda Triangle. The writer/director is Christopher Smith of Creep and Severance fame and the film is being produced by Chris Brown who I had the pleasure of interviewing on the set of Daybreakers earlier in the year. A fabulous character and advocate for the Australian horror film, he cut his creative teeth producing The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa and episodes of The Comic Strip Presents before heading down under to work on Cubbyhouse and the excellent outback Western The Proposition. He’ll be joined by Smith’s regular producer Jason Newmark.

Jamie Blanks is on the verge of wrapping his remake of Long Weekend; with Storm Warning due out on DVD Stateside and Not Quite Hollywood coming soon he’s in for a busy year. His remake of the Seventies classic stars Claudia Karvan; Australia’s would be scream queen with Daybreakers also recently added to her CV, and Jim “Jesus” Caviezel, the nature gone wild thriller is building up a bit of a buzz down here.

UnderworldUnderworld 3: Rise of the Lycans is a sequel many probably thought would never rear its ugly head, but the film is due to begin shooting in New Zealand in January under the watchful eye of FX maestro Patrick Tatopoulos, the man who designed the vampires and werewolves that haunted Kate Beckinsale in the first two films in the franchise. Unfortunately the delightful Kate will not be appearing in this prequel, a shame as I’m trying to arrange a set visit, although Bill Nighy will be revisiting the role of Viktor. The film once again recounts the centuries old battle between the death dealers and the lycans but this time we head back in the very beginning of the feud. Lucian, played by Michael Sheen, is the lycan leader who will rally the werewolves to rise up against Viktor, the vampire king and lead the lycan to freedom.

FrightFest fave Jonathan King has been given the green light for his next project. Under the Mountain, his self proclaimed “Thing for kids” tells the story of teenage twins doing battle with evil deep, in the depths of Auckland’s volcanoes as he explained when we caught up with him. “I’m working on a film called Under the Mountain, again written with Matthew Grainger. It’s a scary sci-fi feature for slightly younger viewers but definitely inspired by The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers!” The film is due to commence shooting in 2008 with WETA once again joining King to work their visual magic. He’ll also be happy that Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures have picked up The Tatooist for US distribution. King wrote the original script, “It’s a thriller which is set in Auckland. It’s about an American tattooist Jake Sawyer, played by Jason Behr, who comes to live in New Zealand to find out about traditional Maori tattooing. He unleashes this vengeful ghost who starts tattooing everybody that Sawyer has tattooed, to death. He has to delve into Pacific mysticism to discover what the ghost’s problem is. It’s got some quite nasty stuff in it!” Chatting to the director Peter Burger, it seems that King has hit bloody pay dirt once again. “Two things in particular about the script for The Tattooist excited me - I was interested in the cross cultural aspects of the story; our hero is a cultural magpie who gets caught up in the superstitions and taboos of another culture, which in itself is in a state of flux. Plenty of drama in that. The second thing that attracted me to the script was the visceral language with which Matt and Jonathan described the horror scenes. Their specific choice of words created images in my mind which were fleshy, wet... they elicited an immediate visceral reaction from me. I thought, if I can create that that sensation on screen, then I will have connected with the audience. And connecting with the audience, by whatever means, is really what we try to do as filmmakers.”

With James Cameron’s Avatar currently already filming in Wellington; Silvaticus 3015, a new Sci-fi film has just been announced to hit the city soon. Not much news available on this at the moment but LA’s Hawkeye Studios will be filming this US funded feature late next year. All we have is this tagline to wet our appetites…”Earth’s destruction in 2085 was no accident, it was mass murder.” Add to these the fact that Peter Jackson has The Lovely Bones in production, Tin Tin in the pipeline and The Dambusters and The Hobbit revving up for 2009 and New Zealand looks like it’s got a bumper couple of years on the horizon. The Water Horse, 10,000bc have already been shot there and Wolverine will be making a pit stop from its home at Sydney’s Fox Studios so it looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more of the Kiwi landscape; Lord of the Rings has a lot to answer for!

That’s it for now; until next time Happy Christmas from down under and here’s to a bloody great 2008.

Be lucky.

Dave

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