Long Weekend

Dir: Colin Eggleston

1978

*****

Few films have stayed with me after watching quite the way Colin Eggleston’s Long Weekend has. The story concerns a couple, Peter (John Hargreaves) and Marcia (Briony Behets), who, along with their dog, go for a weekend camping trip by the coast. The pair show incredible disrespect for nature, especially Peter, such as polluting, killing a dugong (often referred to as a sea cow), throwing lit cigarette butts in dry bush, and spraying insecticide, among other transgressions. As tensions between the couple escalate, nature is not pleased with their environmental wrongdoing and starts to strike back, first by an eagle and possum attacking Peter, and then through more insidious means. While the couple are the audience’s protagonists, you don’t necessarily warm to them, you don’t want harm to come to them but you could feel that they deserve what is coming to them. However, it is the idea that somehow the environment surrounding us is capable of harming us that really chills one to the bone. The clever thing about Long Weekend however, is that it is never clear whether the environment is attacking them, or if it is delusion or pure coincidence. It’s about the creepiest film I can think of. The script was the first feature script written by Everett De Roche, an experienced Australian TV writer. He was inspired by a trip he took on an Easter weekend to an isolated beach in New South Wales. “I started Long Weekend as a way to avoid the TV-cop-show doldrums while still convincing myself I was “working”. Long Weekend was a unique project because I began with no outline, no notes or research, very little idea as to where the story was going, and absolutely zero knowledge of screenplays. I simply started at page 1, scene 1, and made it up as I went. I had only a vague plan to write a kind of environmental horror story. My premise was that Mother Earth has her own auto-immune system, so when humans start behaving like cancer cells, she attacks. I also wanted to avoid a JAWS-like critter film. I wanted the Long Weekend beasties to all be benign-looking and not overtly aggressive.” De Roche wrote the script in ten days. He showed it to Colin Eggleston, who had worked with him at Crawfords, and Eggleston decided to make the movie. Funds were obtained from Film Victoria and the Australian Film Commission and shooting took place in March–April 1977 in Melbourne and near Bega in south-east New South Wales. The ending was originally different according to De Roche: “I wrote an enormously complicated sequence for near the end where the animals give Peter a second chance. They want him to wise up, and he is at the point of doing so when he hears a truck in the distance. He dashes off to the highway, and the animals decide there is no hope. Poetically, they leave it to another man to kill him. However his scene was too difficult to shoot because it involved animals and was wisely cut. It is, in my opinion, one of the greatest Australian films ever made but it wasn’t a huge success down under. However, it tied with Invasion of the Body Snatchers to win the Antennae II Award at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival, won the Special Jury Award at 1978's Paris Film Festival and won Best Film, Prize of the International Critics' Jury for director Eggleston and Best Actor for Hargreaves. Indeed, when the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, producer Richard Brennen noticed a man get up and leave the screening after only ten minutes of the film. In anger and curiosity, he followed the man out to ask him why he was leaving. It turned out the gentleman was a film distributor for South America and was going to buy the rights to the film after seeing only minutes of it. In total four foreign distributors bought rights to release the picture during the screening. Long Weekend is pretty unique and something rather special. It is one of Ozploitation’s greatest achievements as well as being a genuinely dramatic thriller. The last twenty minutes or so are free of dialogue and are pretty much silent. No direct explanation, only hints, are given as to why the mysterious events within nature occur, continuing the tradition in this sub-genre of films of which Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is considered the first and lead example. It’s an eerie nightmare that takes place in most people’s idea of paradise, a conflicting story of conflict that shows the true horror behind the idea of karma. The combination of Eggleston’s direction and Everett De Roche’s script conjures the secret recipe that so many horror film makers try and capture but so very few manage, that of controlled dread. There is no other film like it, a horror masterpiece that is untouchable.