Lake Mungo: The Mockumentary That Grieves

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Most horror wants to make you jump. Lake Mungo wants to make you sit very still and ache. Joel Anderson’s 2008 Australian film is dressed as a television documentary — talking heads, archival home video, a sober narration of dates and places — about a family whose sixteen-year-old daughter drowned. It is, on its surface, a paranormal investigation. Underneath, it is one of the most exact studies of grief the genre has produced, and it earns its scares by refusing to treat them as the point.

The Babadook: The Monster in the Basement of the Mind

Tue, 09 Sep 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) arrived wearing the costume of a haunted-house film and turned out to be a study of a woman drowning in grief while raising a child she cannot always bring herself to love. That gap between the costume and the thing underneath is the film’s whole method, and it is why the picture has outlasted a hundred slicker ghost stories from the same years. The monster in the top hat is a magnificent piece of design. The horror is somewhere else entirely, in a suburban Adelaide house where a mother has not slept properly in six years.

Australian Horror - vo.rs

Lake Mungo: The Mockumentary That Grieves

The Babadook: The Monster in the Basement of the Mind