Horror movies directed by Indigenous Australians are a largely rare category of cinema, immediately making Jon Bell’s Stolen Generations-themed spook-fest The Moogai a work of cultural significance. Even if the film – while unquestionably bold and daring – feels a little underdeveloped. Bell, The Moogai’s writer and director, expanding a short film of the same name from 2020, deploys creepy images that feel broadly familiar; it is steeped in familiar codes and conventions, while belonging to a very different political and ideological context to the standard genre fare.
Bell’s narrative centers around a heavily-pregnant Aboriginal lawyer Sarah (Shari Sebbens), who’s married to a carpenter, Fergus (Meyne Wyatt), with whom she has a six-year-old daughter, Chloe (Jahdeana Mary). Sarah has an uneasy relationship with her biological mother, Ruth (Tessa Rose), who has recently come back into her life decades after Sarah was taken from her and raised by a white family.
When she goes into labour, Sarah has a highly traumatic birth, during which her heart briefly stops beating. “She died on the table,” her doctor tells Fergus. “There’s no telling what comes next.”
The doctor is talking about adverse health effects, not bogeymen, though Sarah will indeed be haunted by one: the Moogai, a child-stealing beast that remains more or less unseen for most of the runtime, until it is eventually fully revealed in a spectacularly ghoulish finale.
Before then, Sarah experiences all sorts of ghastly visions, including bloody foetuses appearing in her kitchen sink, white-eyed children, and snakes slithering over her baby. These scenes are disquieting but don’t swell with menace and dread in perhaps the way they were intended – partly because the cinematography is quite middle of the road, and the film is overlit. I’d love to see a version of it with a more complex palette. Some moments are staged darkly and enigmatically, like a demon’s breath is fogging up the lens, but there’s not enough of them to evoke a truly terrifying atmosphere.
The horror works on multiple levels, with the scariest moments informed by the lived experience of Aboriginal people. In one scene, police are called after a school teacher smells alcohol on Sarah’s breath, unfairly creating an altercation that results in her dropping her baby. Afterwards, when Sarah asks Fergus why he didn’t stick up for her, he replies: “As soon as I say something, I’m the angry black man.”
Moments like this speak to the malleability of horror as an allegorical space in which profoundly important social issues can be explored, in ways that transcend written or spoken word. The Moogai foregrounds the Stolen Generations as a thematic focus in a prologue set in 1970, when white men in suits arrive to take a group of Aboriginal children. One of the kids disappears while hiding in a cave, having been lured in by the titular monster. It’s certainly not subtle.
My favourite Indigenous Australian horror film remains Tracey Moffatt’s nightmarish supernatural 1993 triptych Bedevil, which has amazingly surreal and painterly sets that no string of words can properly summarise – as if designed by Dr Caligari in the space between wakefulness and sleep. Also of note is 2013’s The Darkside, Warwick Thornton’s anthology film, documentary and oral history hybrid, featuring actors reading out ghost stories submitted to the director from across Australia.
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One of these actors is Stebbens, who delivers a superbly transfixing and naturalistic performance in the final chapter of The Darkside. She and the rest of the cast are less effective in The Moogai: all are capable, but strain a little when the film enters an increasingly unreal space.
I wasn’t surprised to read that Jordan Peele’s gobsmacking feature debut Get Out was an inspiration for The Moogai. But that strikingly provocative film is more polished and atmospherically engaging; The Moogai is bumpier and scratchier. Still, it’s sprinkled with interesting moments – including a strange and haunting finale that leaves quite a lot to think about.
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The Moogai is in Australian cinemas from Thursday 31 October
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