John (Daniel Henshall) generates complicity with the boy and makes himself immediately at home within the family. This was a story about a sixteen-year-old boy Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) desperate for a father-figure and finding him in someone whose energy and charisma can’t readily be separated from his calculating aggression and his prejudiced outlook. Several scenes show the central character’s interest in a woman slightly older, but Kurzel saw that while the scenes worked in themselves, they diluted a little the enclosed atmosphere he wanted to create. In Snowtown, the wide-open spaces that allow Australia to have a population density of 3.1 people per square kilometre (next to the UK’s 275) give way to residential claustrophobia, explained well by director Justin Kunzel who discusses the deleted scenes on the DVD extras. Yet Snowtown suggests a small-scale evil: that misery, like charity, begins at home. Some of the finest Australian films of the seventies explored with great visual astuteness the landscape which the individual was so small against, and none more so than several of the aforementioned works: British director Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, Canadian Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright and Australia’s own Peter Weir in Picnic at Hanging Rock and also The Last Wave, with their suggestion of the supernatural or the other-worldly.

Snowtown is based clearly on actual events but gives to the story a hint of transcendent evil that nevertheless remains grounded not just in the rational but in the murky misery of the everyday. Yet what is interesting about the Suburban Australian Gothic of Snowtown isn’t only that it tends to suggest the evil lies in the limited spaces of the conurbation but that it also resides in fact rather than the further reaches of fantastic fear.

It is as though the geographic possesses a metaphysic: that the space itself allows for possibilities far beyond the reach of mere ready reality. But what would an Australian suburban Gothic look like, and could this be a useful way to describe the epidermically terrifying Snowtown, a film that really does get under the skin? Jonathan Rayner has shown in an essay ‘Gothic Definitions: Cinema of Horrors’, a strong interest in a Gothic Australian terror cinema that could even include Walkabout, Bliss and The Last Wave, as Rayner suggests understandably that the horror is evident in numerous manifestations, as though there is something haunting and frightening about the size of the country that shrinks anyone passing through it. Australian gothic is far from a new term scriptwriter Everett de Roche described his work as an example of it, including The Long Weekend, and other instances people give are Wake in Fright, Razorback, Wolf Creek and Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Snowtown by Jeremy Pudney