New Zealand horror did not start with Peter Jackson.

In 1984 a gory little film about mutants on an island won the grand prize at a Paris festival of fantastic cinema, with Alejandro Jodorowsky heading the jury. It was called Death Warmed Up. It came out three years before Bad Taste.

This episode goes back to the country before the rupture. A small, broke, isolated film culture that made only five feature films in the thirty three years to 1972, then cracked open after Sleeping Dogs in 1977 and started making genre films soaked in dread. The three films that all claim to be the first New Zealand horror. The gothic novelist who died certain no one would ever read him. And the blind spot underneath all of it: a settler cinema that found horror in small towns, empty roads and borrowed American slashers, and looked straight past the oldest seam of the supernatural on its own islands. That material had to wait for Māori filmmakers, and they arrived in the very same year Jackson did.

Films and works 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 barely made 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, and the most famous opening line in the country's writing. Sam Neill's "cinema of unease," and how geography became a national mood. The three way fight over which film is really the first New Zealand horror. The Māori thread, and why Māori authored cinema arrives at the Jackson boundary, not before.

Coming up: Late Fees with Mat Dalby launches Thursday 25 June, a fortnightly review segment. First up: Wake in Fright (1971). Next narration episode: Picnic at Hanging Rock, Thursday 2 July.

Every film mentioned is in the Video Vault, the database of Australian and New Zealand horror, at strangecountry.com.au.

Strange Country. A field guide to Antipodean horror.

Some films are about monsters. This one's about the people mad enough to build them.

At this year's Sydney Film Festival, Mat sat down with the three filmmakers behind two films that look, on the surface, like a joke, and turn out to be about the same thing. The absurd, beautiful cost of making genre cinema the world has already decided is rubbish.

First, Mockbuster, Anthony Frith's documentary about cold calling The Asylum, the Burbank studio behind Sharknado, and somehow talking them into letting him make a dinosaur movie in six days. It's a look inside the machine, a film about how the sausage really gets made, and about a man who set out to be an auteur and found himself again the moment he stopped trying.

Then, The Peril at Pincer Point, Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine's black and white surrealist comedy about a sound designer who travels to a cursed island chasing the perfect sound and slowly loses his mind. Made for almost nothing, hand built down to the painted backdrops, and fresh off the Auteur Award at SXSW.

Two films, same disease. This is where horror actually comes from. Not the monsters. The maniacs who build them.

Where to watch:
 Mockbuster: in select cinemas and on demand from 10 July via Giant Pictures. In Australia and New Zealand through Umbrella Entertainment. mockbustermovie.com
 The Peril at Pincer Point: on the festival circuit now, winner of the NEON Auteur Award at SXSW 2026. Follow Jake Kuhn at jakekuhn.co.uk for dates, and if it isn't screening near you, demand it at your local festival.

New: Late Fees with Mat Dalby. Our new fortnightly segment, a deep dive on one new or remastered release worth taking off the shelf, dropping in the weeks between the main episodes. Something from Strange Country every week.

The ecosystem: Strange Country is the home of Australian and New Zealand horror. The Video Vault holds every ANZ horror film we can find, 3,450 and counting, with trailers and where to watch each one, plus a live release schedule of everything coming to cinemas and streaming. All free at strangecountry.com.au.

The Exploitation Years

In 1981, the Australian government introduced a tax rule called Division 10BA, and accidentally funded the most prolific horror decade this country has ever produced.

The deal was simple: put money into an Australian film, write off 150% against your tax. Which meant a film could be a complete disaster and you'd still come out ahead. The worse the film, in a sense, the better the investment. Not a sentence you want anywhere near the founding document of a national cinema.

But here's what came out of it. A man who kills with his mind. A couple hunted by the bush itself. Corporate vampires running a blood dairy. The most famous scream queen in America on the side of the Nullarbor Plain, because two blokes happened to share a lecture theatre at USC in 1968. And a quarter-million dollars of broken robot pig.

This episode is about how the taxman accidentally built a horror industry, what that horror secretly confessed about Australia, and why the country spent thirty years pretending it didn't exist.

Films covered: Patrick (1978), Long Weekend (1978), Thirst (1979), Roadgames (1981), Razorback (1984).

Every film in this episode is in the Video Vault at vault.strangecountry.com.au — posters, trailers, streaming data, and Ricky, who has opinions about all of them.

strangecountry.com.au

July 2023. Two brothers from Brisbane who used to throw each other off things on YouTube made a horror film for four and a half million dollars. It made ninety-two million at the box office.

Something had changed.

Episode 3 of Strange Country covers the last ten years of ANZ horror — and asks what shifted. The first wave pointed outward, at the landscape, at the vastness. The new wave has turned inward. Into the body. Into the home. Into grief that has no name. And underneath all of it, an older, harder question is starting to get louder: who does the land actually belong to?

We cover Talk to Me, Relic, Lake Mungo, Hounds of Love, Killing Ground, You'll Never Find Me, The Moogai, Mārama — and two films playing at the Sydney Film Festival right now: Leviticus and Saccharine.

Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror cinema — where it came from, what it's afraid of, and what it says about two countries that don't always say it straight.

Films covered: Talk to Me (2023), Relic (2020), Lake Mungo (2008), Hounds of Love (2016), Killing Ground (2016), You'll Never Find Me (2023), The Moogai (2024), Mārama (2025), Leviticus (2026), Saccharine (2026)

All films in this episode are in the Vault at strangecountry.com.au

In 1983, a nineteen-year-old in Pukerua Bay pointed a camera at his friends and started shooting. He had no money, no film school, and no crew. Four years later, Bad Taste existed.

Episode 2 of Strange Country goes to New Zealand — to the backyard where Peter Jackson invented himself as a filmmaker, and to the question that's been nagging at the edges of this show since Episode 1. Everyone assumes Jackson invented New Zealand horror. They're wrong. And that's exactly where things get interesting.

We cover Bad Taste (1987), Braindead (1992), the strange political accident that accidentally funded New Zealand's film industry, and the forty-year structural silence that kept Māori filmmakers away from cameras — and what that absence means for everything that came after.

Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror cinema — where it came from, what it's afraid of, and what it says about two countries that don't always say it straight.

Films covered: Bad Taste (1987), Braindead (1992), Sleeping Dogs (1977), Ngāti (1987)

All films in this episode are in the Vault at www.strangecountry.com.au

Seventy percent of Australia is essentially uninhabitable. Not difficult. Not challenging. Uninhabitable.

In the first episode of Strange Country, we look at the films that built Australian horror's most enduring obsession: the landscape as antagonist. Long Weekend (1978), Wolf Creek (2005), and Razorback (1984) are three very different films made across three decades — but they're all circling the same buried question. What does it mean to make a country out of land you took? And what happens when the land starts to answer back?

Films covered: Long Weekend (1978), Wolf Creek (2005), Razorback (1984)

All films in this episode are in the Vault at strangecountry.com.au