There’s a new wave of horror movies and movie makers emerging from this country, and it is the most exciting thing to happen to our corner of the horror genre since our first steps into it back in the 80s.
Actually, right now, there’s a plethora of brilliant B-movies that have seeped out into festivals, streaming and – for the lucky ones – limited cinema releases. No one’s talking about them, though. At least, there really doesn’t seem to be the chatter one would expect from such an exciting bunch of films. Why is beyond me.
Well… I could posit some answers, but I’d probably end up sounding like that bloke down the pub, and I’d rather not. Suffice it to say, for those who’ve not sampled the charms, here’s a cheeky précis on the delightful filth and scabrous entertainment that’s been bubbling over for the last few years.
Fittingly, the trend began with 2019’s Come to Daddy by Ant Timpson. The true doyen of NZ B-movie culture, Timpson made a name for himself as a lifeline for local horror fans, supplying them with banned movies on video via Australia.
Co-creator of the controversial Incredibly Strange Film Festival – which saw censorship battles and even police raids – and still curating movie marathons at Auckland’s Hollywood Avondale cinema, he began producing horrors such as Deathgasm, Turbo Kid and The ABCs of Death.
He has since become what he was destined to be: a writer-director of feature films, beginning with something that, inspired by a week with his own father’s body, is an extraordinarily honest movie.
Come to Daddy is a wound wrenched right open and prodded til the victim passes out. Elijah Wood’s Norval returns to a seaside cabin to reconnect with his Dad (Stephen McHattie), except Dad isn’t the least bit interested in opening up in any sense of the word. Domestic discomfort gives way to a wide spectrum of other discomforts as secrets and lies fall away.
Though set in North America, being written by a Kiwi bloke, this film lays bare a wriggling, squirming cine-gut not seen in local horror in many decades. 1980s films such as The Lost Tribe, Mr Wrong, Bridge to Nowhere – even Death Warmed Up and Braindead – sought to rip up the mental carpet on Kiwis (especially pakeha) and talk about our uglier side.
For their troubles, they were forgotten in favour of films which maintain cosy stereotypes, such as Goodbye Pork Pie and The World’s Fastest Indian, though that broader cultural issue doesn’t seem to have ceased, nor has the horror.
In the years since Come to Daddy, we’ve had a small but thrilling batch of consistently high-quality fright flicks. While there has been some shite, what has shone through most of all is a rediscovered willingness to poke and pick away at modern New Zealanders through the media of gore, scares and button-pushing exploitation.
That impulse is most cuttingly utilised in Sasha Rainbow’s Grafted, where a Chinese student’s radical experimental skin grafts cause mayhem among the snooty Auckland elites. An enormously fun body horror of whirling-dervish satire, it easily stands toe-to-severed-toe with contemporary fare such as Raw and most pertinently, The Substance.
Comedian and playwright Tom Sainsbury’s Loop Track is probably my personal favourite of this current crop. An anxiety-riddled man, Ian (Sainsbury), has his lonely walking holiday ruined both by the extrovert twats who latch onto him and a mysterious presence in the woods, which only exacerbates his paranoia.
The witheringly awkward interactions between the cast are as much informed by Mike Leigh as Blair Witch, and the climactic revelation is so unique to this country’s psychogeography, you wonder why no one’s done it before.
Loop Track was released in 2023, and there are two other genre works from that year worth mentioning: no-budget sci-fi delight The Paragon and cost-of-living crisis crime flick, Home Kills. Both worthy of attention.
Last year also contained two banger horror films, both of which, ashamedly, I was sneery towards before going in: Mārama and The Weed Eaters. Looking like awful, pretentious elevated horror, Mārama turned out to be a fearsomely mounted debut by Taratoa Stappard, featuring a rock-solid central performance from Ariana Osborne as the titular wahine, lost in imperial England, whose befuddlement turns to righteous, spitting fury at her British hosts.
The Weed Eaters looked like the worst. A $20,000 comedy horror about stoners getting like, stoned and like, eating people? Please! How wrong I was! It’s a brilliantly modulated, very funny, tightly made and surprising jaunt about companionship and cannibalism: a stoner comedy that aims high (thank you)!
Perhaps the real star emerging from this movement, though, is James Ashcroft. With two darkly sociopolitical horror-thrillers under his belt, he is about to release two more with no less than Emilia Clarke and Robert De Niro!
His previous features, Coming Home in the Dark and The Rule of Jenny Pen, both expertly took audiences into cesspits of moral despair.
Coming Home in the Dark was a descent into familial Hell as a family outing is brutally cut short by two gun-wielding thugs. In contrast, The Rule of Jenny Pen was a blackly comic tale of elderly abuse from within as Geoffrey Rush’s cantankerous judge takes on John Lithgow’s malevolent convalescence home bully.
Both films were thoughtful, well-judged essays in nastiness.
This country is making some really good horror movies right now. Movies that are diverse in their styles and interests, but often unique to us in a way that never falls into cloying Kiwiana.
These movies have bite and a healthy dose of spite. They have something to say about where and who we are right now, but – in keeping with this post-elevated horror age – are happy to do so with buckets of blood, often with a sense of humour and pride in the genre.
It’s a small field but it ain’t fallow. Let’s not let these movies lose the box-office battle to middlebrow dross.
About the Author
Simon Kingsley-Holmes is a writer and stand-up who has reviewed movies for The Critic and Radio One 91FM in Dunedin. He is currently writing his first book all about New Zealand horror movies.
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