New Zealand horror did not start with Peter Jackson. In 1984 David Blyth's Death Warmed Up won the grand prize at a Paris festival of fantastic cinema, with Alejandro Jodorowsky heading the jury, three full years before Bad Taste. This episode goes back to the country before the rupture: a small, broke, isolated film culture that was already making genre films soaked in dread, and the blind spot that ran underneath all of it.

For most of the twentieth century New Zealand barely made films at all. Five fiction features in the thirty three years to 1972. Then Sleeping Dogs in 1977, the Film Commission in 1978, and the lights came on. What came out was dark, gothic and uneasy, exactly as Sam Neill would later name it. But it was a settler cinema. It found its horror in small towns, empty roads and borrowed American slashers, and looked straight past the oldest and richest seam of the supernatural on its own islands. That material had to wait for Māori filmmakers, who arrived in the very same year Jackson did.

Films Covered

  • Death Warmed Up (1984, dir. David Blyth)
  • Strange Behavior (1981, dir. Michael Laughlin)
  • The Scarecrow (1982, dir. Sam Pillsbury)
  • Mr Wrong (1985, dir. Gaylene Preston)
  • The Quiet Earth (1985, dir. Geoff Murphy)
  • Under the Mountain (1981, TVNZ)
  • Angel Mine (1978, dir. David Blyth)
  • Sleeping Dogs (1977, dir. Roger Donaldson)
  • Ngati (1987, dir. Barry Barclay)
  • Mauri (1988, dir. Merata Mita)
  • Cinema of Unease (1995, Sam Neill)

In This Episode

  • Why New Zealand made almost no films for most of the twentieth century, and the cultural cringe that kept it that way.
  • Ronald Hugh Morrieson, the king of New Zealand gothic, who died in obscurity in 1972, the year before the country was ready for him.
  • Sam Neill's "cinema of unease," and how two thin islands at the bottom of the world turned geography into a national mood.
  • The three way fight over which film is really the first New Zealand horror: Strange Behavior, The Scarecrow, Death Warmed Up.
  • The Māori thread, and why Māori authored cinema arrives at the Jackson boundary in 1987, not before.

Up Next

Late Fees with Mat Dalby launches Thursday 25 June, a fortnightly review segment, opening with Wake in Fright (1971) 4K restoration by Umbrella. The next narration episode, Picnic at Hanging Rock, drops Thursday 2 July.

Every film in this episode is in the Video Vault, our database of Australian and New Zealand horror.