What's it all about.

Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror. Not just the films. The fears underneath them. The things a country buries in its fiction because it can't quite say them out loud.

The outback that swallows people. The isolation that turns neighbours into threats. The colonial guilt sitting just below the surface of so much of what we made. Horror is the genre that says the quiet part loud, and nobody has done that better than the filmmakers working in this part of the world over the last fifty years.

This is a show about those films. Those filmmakers. And the culture that produced them.

I'm Mat Dalby. I'm a designer and screenwriter based in Sydney. My screenplay The Moor King won Best Unproduced Screenplay at Dark Nights 2025.

I was seven. Huddled in the crook of my mum's knees while she lay on the sofa, watching Peter Lorre in The Beast with Five Fingers. When that finished, we watched Hammer's The House that Dripped Blood. I was hooked.

I've been obsessed with horror cinema ever since. After many years living in New Zealand and now based in Sydney, the horror output of both countries has become an obsession. The body of work is unsurpassed. Strange Country is the show I kept waiting for someone else to make.

Nobody did.

Each episode goes deep on a film, a filmmaker, or an idea. Some are solo. Some are conversations with the people who made these films. All of them come back to the same question: what does this say about where we come from?

We also have The Vault. It's a searchable database of over 3,400 Australian and New Zealand horror films going all the way back to the silent era. It's always growing, and if you know something that should be in there, I want to hear from you. If you want something to watch tonight, or you just want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes, start there.

If this sounds like your kind of thing, subscribe. New episodes drop when they're ready. I'll never send you anything that isn't worth your time.

Welcome to Strange Country.