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.

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?

A fresh episode drops every Thursday.

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.

And it has Ricky.

Ricky is the Vault's video store clerk. He knows every film in there, has opinions on all of them, and actually remembers what you've watched. Ask him what to put on tonight. Ask him why New Zealand keeps making better werewolf films than anyone else. Ask him anything. He's the person you always wanted behind the counter at your local video store, and he never closes.

Strange Country is also a community. When you subscribe you get a membership card. Yes, a downloadable membership card. Because this is a club. A club for people who take antipodean horror seriously, who know that Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock and Bad Taste aren't just genre films, they're documents.

Your card comes with a personal watch history, a watchlist, and everything we add as this grows.

Welcome to Strange Country.

Mat