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wolf creek
wolf creek interview
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Director Glen McLean sinks his teeth into the outback.

Thirty thousand people are reported missing in Australia every year. Ninety per cent are found within a month. Some are never seen again. With this statistic in hand and flashed up for viewers in the opening salvo of Wolf Creek, Australian first-time director Glen McLean decided to make a gut-wrenching horror about the 10 per cent who are never found.

McLean, who once studied fine arts in Melbourne and had ambitions to be a landscape painter, says it took him some time to decide that this was what he wanted to make a movie about: “Originally I started to write this thriller about a killer on a bus, and I kept on working on this story for four or five years and kept coming back to it.



“I had this idea of a psychopath f**king with people in the outback. There were three or four cases that constantly came up, like the Snow Town murders in Adelaide; cases that filtered through to the themes I was writing about - people from the Australian outback isolated. So I began incorporating those into the script until eventually the final script became what it is.”

Like all the best horrors (eg, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho), the premise of Wolf Creek is dead simple. An Australian guy, accompanied by two British backpackers, visits Wolf Creek, site of the country’s biggest meteorite crater. They suffer several unexplained electrical failures before meeting a man who’s definitely not from an AA advert. (Let’s just say he’s not very nice.)



Listening to McLean talk about the movie is unnerving. He seems to have an unhealthy fascination with the genre: “The pacing and the rhythm are very conscious, as most great horror stories spend a lot of time setting up the context and reality of the characters before they threaten danger.” Occasionally, McLean slips into lecture mode when describing what makes horror work, but in his defence his debut movie has put his cerebral theories into practice. And he’s right, it is blood-curdling.


Kaleem Aftab 15 September 05
Wolf Creek, on selected release 16 September 05.
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