Lake Mungo (2008)
Writ and Dir: Joel Anderson
Cinematography: John Brawley
Some time ago, a friend asked me to explain why I like horror. I feel the answer contains two parts of a whole, and might go some way to explaining the enduring popularity of the genre: firstly, the scares, and secondly, the satisfaction. In horror, the unseen and unknown forces in our world become tangible and immediate. We are allowed to look at what we otherwise only feel. In this sense, the analogy is a fantasy, a wish to know and recognise the forces in our history and our culture which shape our lives, but also the fear that confronting them would be more than we could bear. Bad horror has lost sight of this, but good horror taps into what the audience already brings to the table.
Lake Mungo is just such a film.
On the first front, that of movie-going thrills, it is extremely creepy. It brought back long-ago memories of leaving the room during The Sixth Sense, or begging my friend to stop playing the scene in Jaws where the woman gets eaten, when I was probably not old enough to be watching those films.
On the second front, Lake Mungo fits into my favourite type of ghost story, one that explores haunting in a complex and real way by focusing on the relationship between people and history. Basically, the film is presented as a documentary about the Palmer family after their daughter Alice drowns during a family picnic. Formally, the film was spot on, which is why I've made sure to mention cinematographer John Brawley. In the DVD commentary the credit which the film-makers give the audience in terms of visual literacy is commendable, and certainly explains the success of the formal elements. They go to lengths in order to tap into the audience's recognition of 'documentary signposts': for the 'news footage' of the drowning, they staged the event and conscripted professional teams to carry out the search for and retrieval of the body. They also conscripted local news teams to cover the event as they would if it was real, and then used that footage in the film. The interview scenes involving the Palmers and their neighbours were largely improvised in order to achieve believability, the type of film was constantly switched according to how the 'real footage' was supposedly captured, etc. As for tricking me into believing it as reality, despite my better knowledge, it succeeded, and that made it all the more freaky. However, on this point I will briefly mention a potential bad decision: I was snapped out of the reality of the film by reflecting on the possibility that the Palmers were named after Laura Palmer, the girl who drowns at the beginning of the TV series Twin Peaks. It's not the only connection, either: some of the home-movie and photo footage of Alice Palmer is reminiscent of footage of Laura in Twin Peaks, and as the Palmers (in Lake Mungo) learn more about Alice's past, the story takes some turns that are again very similar to the Twin Peaks narrative. If this naming reference was a deliberate decision, I think they did themselves a disservice by taking away from the supposedly nonfiction approach.
One particular feature summarises the successes of this film: it dwells on visual material. It leaves pictures on the screen, zooms in, replays, and even redirects your eye and re-contextualises images. This is an extremely effective expression of our relationship to haunting,of our mind and memory's relationship to what we dwell on, and I think it is owing to this that the film is so creepy.
This is a film that does justice to the history of the genre, both of ghost stories and of horror, and it gives me great pleasure to see such a high quality Australian film.
