Directed by: Terry Bourke
Written by: Terry Bourke
Starring: Norman Yemm, Carla Hoogeveen, Mike Dorsey, Briony Behets
"HUNTED AND TRAPPED! HER NIGHTMARE IS JUST BEGINNING!"
In the last review I talked about Mario Bava's A BAY OF BLOOD and (attempted) to give a bit of an idea of where it sits in terms of influence and importance to the slasher genre. Now it's time to travel almost 9,000 miles from Italy to one place you might least expect to find an important piece of the slasher puzzle; Australia.
Director Terry Bourke had an ambitious idea for a television anthology and managed to make a deal with the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) for a 12-part series to be called Fright. As with any series a pilot needed to be made and after 12 days of shooting Bourke had his first episode. Unfortunately the Fright series never materialized, probably due to the censorship issues it endured and the conservative state of Australian television in the 70s.
NIGHT OF FEAR was banned straight away by the censors for 'indecency and obscenity' but was successfully appealed and received a brief theatrical run under an R18+ rating. The film then faded into obscurity before finally receiving a home video release on dvd over 30 years later in 2005. Now I don't know about you but any time a movie is banned for reasons of 'indecency' or 'obscenity' it immediately piques my interest, so I bought myself a copy of the Umbrella release to find out exactly what was so inappropriate for 1970s Australian cinema. And being Australian myself (and an avid horror fan) I was particularly curious to see just what Australia's first horror movie might look like.
You could probably argue the case that WAKE IN FRIGHT is Australia's first horror film but although it does contain a certain streak of the macabre and paranoia it pales in comparison to the non-stop panic and terror presented in NIGHT OF FEAR. It's worth explaining that this isn't a particularly conventional movie in pretty much any sense. To begin with the film's inception as the pilot for a possible series means that it falls well short of your average feature at around only 54 minutes or so. It also happens to have exactly zero dialogue during the course its entire running time, indeed the only vocalizations consist of screaming, grunting and moaning, and there's a lot of it. And (probably due to this lack of dialogue) none of the characters have actual names, instead being credited as The Man and The Woman etc.
Plot-wise NIGHT OF FEAR is pretty bare-bones type stuff. It presents a backwoods-dwelling serial killer (Yemm)who stalks and traps a young woman (Hoogeveen) who happens to be unlucky enough to wanderer too close to his home. Incredibly the themes and tone of NIGHT OF FEAR are reminiscent of a certain horror classic you may well be aware of, that being the legendary TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Even more incredible is that if you look at the dates you will notice that NIGHT OF FEAR actually beat TCM to the punch by a whole two years. Was it an influence on Tobe Hooper's classic? I have no idea, and with its limited exposure it's hard to believe that Hooper would have seen this at the time but I really do like the idea that a low budget horror movie from halfway around the world influenced one of horror's classics.
NIGHT OF FEAR may not be a particularly great movie by most people's standards but it is a brilliant example of experimental filmmaking in the 70s. Apart from the lack of dialogue and character names the film also experiments with unusual camera angles (including one from inside a rotary phone looking out through the transparent dial) and a fast-paced synth soundtrack - pretty uncommon for the time. It also contains some unique set design in the form of the killer's cabin which is filled with an array of unusual and macabre items - burned dolls heads, newspaper clippings, taxidermy - which may seem like standard fare in today's horror movies, but in 1972? No way. NIGHT OF FEAR was way ahead of its time and is an extremely important part of Australian (and international) horror which precedes many slashers and it's definitely worth checking out if you have any interest in horror cinema history or experimental filmmaking
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