Snowtown: Horror of the mind

Australia’s most tragic serial murders have been re-imagined as Snowtown, a psychological thriller that will prove its early detractors wrong. Miguel Gonzalez reports.

Few Australian films have attracted as much attention as Snowtown, and it’s easy to see why. The ‘Bodies in Barrels’ murders it’s based on shocked the nation in 1999, when eight bodies were found in barrels of acid in a disused building in the small town of Snowtown, South Australia. Four people were arrested and charged over the murder of 12 victims; John Justin Bunting was the central figure behind the killings, with the assistance of Robert Joe Wagner, Mark Ray Haydon, and James Vlassakis, the son of Bunting’s partner Elizabeth Harvey.

Ever since the project was announced and it was revealed it would receive public funding, some were eager to cast the first stone and dismiss the film as “a shocking way to spend taxpayer money”, condemning “the unfortunate public appetite for entertainment based on tales of murder”.

Snowtown had not been shot yet, and those people had not even read the script before making such headline-catching statements. They were opposing it based on pre-conceived ideas, so producers Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, and first-time director Justin Kurzel, knew they’d have to convince the public that their vision for the project was very far from making an exploitative horror/torture film.