A place for monsters: Wolf Creek and the Australian Outback

The international release of Wolf Creek 2 provides an opportunity to revisit the representations of monstrosity in the Australian outback through the lens of rural horror. As a space defined in terms of key oppositions, rural idyll and rural horror, the outback presents a troubling place in Australian culture. This paper will engage with some of the interpretive themes offered by Wolf Creek, in particular by scrutinizing imagery of the outback. In contrast, tourism advertising offers an opposing representation of the outback yet relies upon the same language and context of the landscape. How monstrosity is constructed through the subversion of the rural idyll and how this rendering of the landscape is historically informed is discussed, as well as the role that true crime has come to play in such renderings of Australian monstrosity.