The Eighteenth Night of Halloween: Long Weekend

ON THE EIGHTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Long Weekend (1978), directed by Colin Eggleston. This is another peculiar Ozploitation movie set in the Australian outback, but here the outback plays a much more active role, essentially becoming the main antagonist, at least in the heroes’ minds. A feuding married couple decides to go on a weekend outing to see if they can mend things, but the asshole husband only creates further strain by insisting they go camping at the beach, whereas the wife hates the outdoors. Along the way, the couple commit numerous crimes against mother nature, including tossing a lit cigarette into dry brush (this resonates as especially ominous today), running over a kangaroo on the highway, strewing wrappers and cans everywhere, smashing an eagle egg, and shooting a rare sea creature that looks like a manatee but that the husband says is a “bunyip” (the bunyip is actually an Australian cryptid). The camera dwells on all of these acts forebodingly and cuts to shots of swarming ants, diving birds, growling badgers, and so forth, implying that the collective spirit of the wildlife is becoming increasingly fed up with these two.

So, initially this movie seems like something Smoky the Bear and the Don’t Pollute Owl would make if they thought a horror movie would be a good way to spread their message. But as it goes on, we realize that the narrative never actually pulls the trigger on showing an undeniably motivated attack by nature, like in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Instead, the film continues to explore the breakdown of the couple’s marriage, as they subject one another to increasing psychological torment. At some point, the crimes against nature become more of a reflection of the husband’s inner nastiness than an impetus for nature’s revenge. We do see an eagle and a possum attack the husband, but in both instances he provokes them. We also hear plenty of weird howling in the night, and there are a series of equipment failures and other accidents—but objectively speaking, that just seems to be what ordinarily happens to people camping in Australia? In other words, despite how the film frames and builds up the story as a humanity-versus-nature conflict, we never actually see anything inexplicable on screen, such that it could all simply be due to the husband boomeranging his own antagonism back on himself, thereby bringing about the couple’s eventual self-destruction. The couple do at one point discover that another camper has killed herself, but it could be that this beach just attracts people who are unraveling and magnifies their mental struggles.

I appreciated that it was left ambiguous, though. There’s something weirdly amusing about juxtaposing a clumsy “give a hoot” environmental message with a couple’s harrowing descent into madness.