Strange Country – Details, episodes & analysis

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Strange Country

Mat Dalby

Tv & Film

Frequency: 1 episode/5d. Total Eps: 5

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.

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Data updated on 14/07/2026

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Strange Country - The Maniacs Who Make the Monsters: Mockbuster & The Peril at Pincer Point (SFF Special)

Episode 5

Tuesday, June 16, 2026 • Duration 30:34

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 genre cinema the world has already decided is rubbish.

First, Mockbuster, Anthony Frith's documentary about cold calling The Asylum, the Burbank studio behind Sharknado, and somehow talking them into letting him make a dinosaur movie in six days. It's a look inside the machine, a film about how the sausage really gets made, and about a man who set out to be an auteur and found himself again the moment he stopped trying.

Then, The Peril at Pincer Point, Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine's black and white surrealist comedy about a sound designer who travels to a cursed island chasing the perfect sound and slowly loses his mind. Made for almost nothing, hand built down to the painted backdrops, and fresh off the Auteur Award at SXSW.

Two films, same disease. This is where horror actually comes from. Not the monsters. The maniacs who build them.

Where to watch:
Mockbuster: in select cinemas and on demand from 10 July via Giant Pictures. In Australia and New Zealand through Umbrella Entertainment. mockbustermovie.com
The Peril at Pincer Point: on the festival circuit now, winner of the NEON Auteur Award at SXSW 2026. Follow Jake Kuhn at jakekuhn.co.uk for dates, and if it isn't screening near you, demand it at your local festival.

New: Late Fees with Mat Dalby. Our new fortnightly segment, a deep dive on one new or remastered release worth taking off the shelf, dropping in the weeks between the main episodes. Something from Strange Country every week.

The ecosystem: Strange Country is the home of Australian and New Zealand horror. The Video Vault holds every ANZ horror film we can find, 3,450 and counting, with trailers and where to watch each one, plus a live release schedule of everything coming to cinemas and streaming. All free at strangecountry.com.au.

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Strange Country - Episode 04: The Exploitation Years.

Episode 4

Thursday, June 4, 2026 • Duration 48:38

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 could be a complete disaster and you'd still come out ahead. The worse the film, in a sense, the better the investment. Not a sentence you want anywhere near the founding document of a national cinema.

But here's what came out of it. A man who kills with his mind. A couple hunted by the bush itself. Corporate vampires running a blood dairy. The most famous scream queen in America on the side of the Nullarbor Plain, because two blokes happened to share a lecture theatre at USC in 1968. And a quarter-million dollars of broken robot pig.

This episode is about how the taxman accidentally built a horror industry, what that horror secretly confessed about Australia, and why the country spent thirty years pretending it didn't exist.

Films covered: Patrick (1978), Long Weekend (1978), Thirst (1979), Roadgames (1981), Razorback (1984).

Every film in this episode is in the Video Vault at vault.strangecountry.com.au — posters, trailers, streaming data, and Ricky, who has opinions about all of them.

strangecountry.com.au

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Strange Country — Episode 3: The New Wave

Episode 3

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 • Duration 28:21

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 shifted. The first wave pointed outward, at the landscape, at the vastness. The new wave has turned inward. Into the body. Into the home. Into grief that has no name. And underneath all of it, an older, harder question is starting to get louder: who does the land actually belong to?

We cover Talk to Me, Relic, Lake Mungo, Hounds of Love, Killing Ground, You'll Never Find Me, The Moogai, Mārama — and two films playing at the Sydney Film Festival right now: Leviticus and Saccharine.

Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror cinema — where it came from, what it's afraid of, and what it says about two countries that don't always say it straight.

Films covered: Talk to Me (2023), Relic (2020), Lake Mungo (2008), Hounds of Love (2016), Killing Ground (2016), You'll Never Find Me (2023), The Moogai (2024), Mārama (2025), Leviticus (2026), Saccharine (2026)

All films in this episode are in the Vault at strangecountry.com.au

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Strange Country — Episode 2: Peter Jackson's Bloody Education

Episode 2

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 • Duration 23:19

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, and to the question that's been nagging at the edges of this show since Episode 1. Everyone assumes Jackson invented New Zealand horror. They're wrong. And that's exactly where things get interesting.

We cover Bad Taste (1987), Braindead (1992), the strange political accident that accidentally funded New Zealand's film industry, and the forty-year structural silence that kept Māori filmmakers away from cameras — and what that absence means for everything that came after.

Strange Country is a podcast about Australian and New Zealand horror cinema — where it came from, what it's afraid of, and what it says about two countries that don't always say it straight.

Films covered: Bad Taste (1987), Braindead (1992), Sleeping Dogs (1977), Ngāti (1987)

All films in this episode are in the Vault at www.strangecountry.com.au

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Strange Country — Episode 1: The Outback As Monster

Episode 1

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 • Duration 24:36

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 Razorback (1984) are three very different films made across three decades — but they're all circling the same buried question. What does it mean to make a country out of land you took? And what happens when the land starts to answer back?

Films covered: Long Weekend (1978), Wolf Creek (2005), Razorback (1984)

All films in this episode are in the Vault at strangecountry.com.au

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Strange Country – Details, episodes & analysis

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Strange Country – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

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Latest published episodes

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Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

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