Long Weekend

Colour, 35 mm
Australia, 1978, 95 min
Section: Midnight Screenings: Ozploitation!

Synopsis

This classic horror film with environmental elements tips the odds toward nature in its conflict with humans. A young married couple sets out for an extended weekend in the outback, but the trip is marked by increasing marital tension. While the man experiences fantasies of conquering the virgin countryside by cutting down trees and shooting animals, the woman longs to return to civilization. Nature begins to respond to their self- centeredness with bizarre incidents in which it seems that plants and animals willfully attack them. The tense situation leads to the couple’s definitive breakup, with marital disputes and recent traumatic events rising to the surface. The film, devoid of modern, superficial thrills and spills, gradually allows fear of the unseen and the intangible to enter the married couple’s life. Harrowing sounds and hallucinatory images push the characters toward losing not only the certainties inherent in civilization but also their minds.

About the director

Colin Eggleston (b. 1941, Melbourne, Australia-2002, Geneva, Switzerland) began as an editor in England, work he continued in Australia. He started out as a director of TV series for Crawford Productions, then debuted in features with a sequel to the ribald comedy about women’s sexuality, Fantasm Comes Again (1977). A year later he shot his climactic work, the renowned horror film Long Weekend. In the 1980s, he directed a number of horror films but they met with little success. Among titles such as The Little Feller (1982), Innocent Prey (1984) and Outback Vampires (1987), two others might be called stand-outs: Cassandra (1986), about a girl who envisions her brother committing murder, and the sci-fi adventure Sky Pirates (1985).