ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
You made it. Welcome.
Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror. Not as a curiosity. Not as camp. As a body of work that deserves the same serious attention as anything coming out of the US or Europe. More, honestly.
The films are the starting point, not the destination. Each episode uses them as a lens into something bigger. Colonial guilt. Landscape as threat. The fears a country buries in its fiction. The people who shaped what fear looks like down here, past and present.
This corner of world cinema has been ignored for too long. We're here to fix that, and we're really glad you're along for the ride.
Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror. Not as a curiosity. Not as camp. As a body of work that deserves the same serious attention as anything coming out of the US or Europe. More, honestly.
The films are the starting point, not the destination. Each episode uses them as a lens into something bigger. Colonial guilt. Landscape as threat. The fears a country buries in its fiction. The people who shaped what fear looks like down here, past and present.
This corner of world cinema has been ignored for too long. We're here to fix that, and we're really glad you're along for the ride.
Hosts:
Update frequency:
weekly
Average audio length:
31 minutes
English
Australia
7 episodes
since May 27, 2026
episodic
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
Three schoolgirls and their maths teacher walk up a rock on Valentine's Day, 1900, and never come back down. It never happened. Australia decided to remember it anyway.
This episode: Joan Lindsay, the woman who stopped clocks, and the novel she dreamed in two weeks. How Peter Weir and a $100 optio…
PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
New Zealand horror did not start with Peter Jackson.
In 1984 a gory little film about mutants on an island won the grand prize at a Paris festival of fantastic cinema, with Alejandro Jodorowsky heading the jury. It was called Death Warmed Up. It came out three years before Bad Taste.
This episode g…
Some films are about monsters. This one's about the people mad enough to build them.
At this year's Sydney Film Festival, Mat sat down with the three filmmakers behind two films that look, on the surface, like a joke, and turn out to be about the same thing. The absurd, beautiful cost of making gen…
The Exploitation Years
In 1981, the Australian government introduced a tax rule called Division 10BA, and accidentally funded the most prolific horror decade this country has ever produced.
The deal was simple: put money into an Australian film, write off 150% against your tax. Which meant a film c…
July 2023. Two brothers from Brisbane who used to throw each other off things on YouTube made a horror film for four and a half million dollars. It made ninety-two million at the box office.
Something had changed.
Episode 3 of Strange Country covers the last ten years of ANZ horror — and asks what …
In 1983, a nineteen-year-old in Pukerua Bay pointed a camera at his friends and started shooting. He had no money, no film school, and no crew. Four years later, Bad Taste existed.
Episode 2 of Strange Country goes to New Zealand — to the backyard where Peter Jackson invented himself as a filmmaker…
Seventy percent of Australia is essentially uninhabitable. Not difficult. Not challenging. Uninhabitable.
In the first episode of Strange Country, we look at the films that built Australian horror's most enduring obsession: the landscape as antagonist. Long Weekend (1978), Wolf Creek (2005), and Ra…
You have seen all episodes of this podcast
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Mat Dalby, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.
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