Since the heyday of the big four – Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Chucky – slasher movie fans have continually searched for the next great villain. That’s not to say there haven’t been any good ones at all, though it’s doubtful there are any as enduring as those originals, except for maybe Victor Crowley in Adam Green’s Hatchet (2006-) series. It’s that, as horror fans, we’re always looking for a piece of the glory days— when slashers were a new phenomenon and there was something collectively thrilling about them we all loved. Even when it was a supernatural-style slasher, the modern settings were fresh, as opposed to the haunted houses, castles, and other locations of previous generations.
More than that, the slasher’s rise in popularity coincided with a spike in real life serial murder. After Peeping Tom (1960), Psycho (1960), Black Christmas (1974), and a few other choice movies shaped the modern slasher, once the 1960s ended and the 1970s were well underway, media coverage of serial killers dominated cultural interest in the West. People like Ted Bundy, Albert DeSalvo, Edmund Kemper, Richard Trenton Chase, among others, were a regular part of the news cycle. By the time the 1980s rolled around, more murderers were turned into household names worldwide, and horror lovers were busy drinking from a seemingly endless cup of slasher movies.
It’s not that murder is any less popular today. True crime has become a huge interest, from documentary shows on tv and Netflix to podcasts and talk radio. It’s more a case that even those who love horror are burned out by the slasher, and it takes a special villain, or movie in general, to pique interest in the sub-genre again. That’s why when Mick Taylor showed up in Greg McLean’s 2005 horror film Wolf Creek, he was a nasty breath of fresh air for slasher movies. All the better, McLean was inspired by one of the worst killers from his own country, Australia: a man called Ivan Milat.
Between 1989 and 1993, Milat terrorized New South Wales, Australia. At that time he wasn’t known as the one killing young people throughout the area. He was a member of a well known family whose tradition seemed to be criminal behaviour of all varieties. In those five years, seven partially buried corpses were found in the Belanglo State Forest— five of whom were foreigners backpacking in Australia. These brutal crimes became known across Australian media as the Backpacker Murders.
McLean plays the plot out like any other slasher horror movie, in that the killer’s not the main character like he might be were it a serial killer biopic. Instead, the movie starts out with thirty minutes or more focused on the perspective of three people who will eventually become the victims of Milat— only here, his name is Mick Taylor and he’s played with menacing delight by John Jarratt.
Wolf Creek, as well as Wolf Creek 2 (2013), utilizes many of the familiar tropes of not just the slasher sub-genre, but also of the backwoods horror to tell this serial killer’s story. McLean sets everything in the deep Outback, where people (let alone police) are scarce, and wilderness stretches into an endless horizon. There’s a sense of spatial isolation, and social isolation, as well. In the first movie, tell-tale signs are there as the soon-to-be victims – three travelers named Ben (Nathan Phillips), Liz (Cassandra Magrath), and Kristy (Kestie Morassi) – enter the rural spaces of Australia. Initially they’re harassed by a bunch of local hillbilly stereotypes, and because we don’t yet know the villain, these men could easily be the slashers to eventually hunt our victims down. Later, their car inexplicably breaks down in an inconveniently remote location. Finally, it’s the appearance of Mick himself – posing as a friendly local, the same shtick Milat would use on backpackers to lure them into complacency – that heralds the beginning of all the terror, and checks off all the trope boxes. McLean’s familiarity with the slasher movie works as a seamless adaptation from real life to fiction. If you didn’t know beforehand about the ‘based on a true story’ aspect of Wolf Creek, you might not realize this isn’t just another fictional horror scenario.
When you do know the real story on which McLean’s screenplay is based, the similarities between Mick and his real life counterpart Ivan are very evident, physical and otherwise. They’re both well built, rough-looking men. Their facial hair is similar: Ivan wore a handlebar moustache, whereas Mick sports moustache stubble and a thick pair of mutton chops. Both the fictional version and the real Milat lived in a remote area of the Outback, which provided them plenty of space to commit torture and gruesome murders relatively unbothered. They each wear the same wide brimmed hat. In a scene where one of Mick’s victims is trying to escape, she finds a room full of serial killer souvenirs: tons and tons of backpacks, suitcases, cameras, cell phones, and other tourist-related items, like some of what was found on the Milat family property after his eventual arrest. In Wolf Creek 2, Mick comes upon two German backpackers who are based on two of Milat’s real life victims, Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habschied, and one of them is viciously decapitated just like one of the actual victims. Yet where the two figures are most alike lies in their psychopathy.
After Mick has captured his victims he exhibits behaviour torn straight from the actual story of Milat. For instance, Milat showed signs of piquerism. He derived a sexual thrill from cutting and torturing his victims with a knife. He particularly enjoyed the penetrative act of stabbing a knife into someone’s flesh. This isn’t hard to see in the fictional Mick, who carries a massive hunting knife to use on his prey. Best of all, McLean’s screenplay plays on the real Milat’s piquerism while also delivering dark comedy aimed at the pop culture portrayal of Australian identity, further acting as subtle foreshadowing. In an early scene, Ben riffs on Crocodile Dundee (1986) and the tired “That’s not a knife— this is a knife!” joke as he and his travel companions sit around the fire back at Mick’s place. The joke doesn’t really sit well with Mick. It’s later the joke comes to have even more grim significance, after Mick’s revealed his sinister intent for playing good samaritan to the travellers with their broken down vehicle. He utters the Crocodile Dundee line while using the knife to stab one of the women. A smart, albeit cruel moment of expert writing on McLean’s part.
Another terrifying link between Milat and Mick’s piquerist behaviour is what the latter so eloquently refers to as making “a head on a stick.” Lots of slashers have stabbed people in the spine. No big deal, right? Well, Milat was twisted, and part of his psychopathy was a need to torture, inflicting the maximum amount of pain possible on a still living victim. One method he used was stabbing a victim in the spine and twisting his knife around to sever all the necessary parts of the spine while making sure they wouldn’t die. This allowed him time to torture his victims. During several scenes in Mick’s Outback house of horrors, corpses are visible in the background. There’s one specific corpse tied up, ravaged, and she no longer even has a head. This seems to be what happens when Mick is finished, after his victims are finally dead, because his thrill comes from them undergoing the torture and reacting to it. Referring to this paralyzed “head on a stick,” Mick tells the victim he’s currently torturing: “She was good for months… until she lost her head!”
We can’t neglect McLean’s sequel, Wolf Creek 2, as an important part of the genetic slasher makeup in Mick’s DNA, and this is for a couple reasons. First, the character Paul Hammersmith (Ryan Corr) is loosely based on the one person to successfully escape Milat’s clutches, a British man called Paul Onions. The real Paul wasn’t tortured like the fictional one, though. He managed to flee Milat’s truck when the killer – who introduced himself not as Ivan, but Bill – took out ropes and tried tying him up. Amazingly, the police took a statement from Onions but nothing was done, and it wasn’t until clearer evidence was uncovered several years later that his statement became relevant. Secondly, the impromptu Australian trivia game Mick forces Paul to play with him is well adapted writing by McLean as a way to illustrate the sick way in which the real Milat toyed with his victims before dispatching them. Coupled with the ending – when Mick willingly lets Paul go, not without being badly wounded and stripped near naked – McLean tells the story of Wolf Creek 2 in a way that, even more than the first movie, evokes Milat’s crimes. Perhaps the most perfect part of McLean’s writing is how, at the end of both Wolf Creek and Wolf Creek 2, the incompetence of police work done in the real case of Milat is exemplified by how Ben and Paul – the surviving victims of each respective movie – are treated as suspects in the disappearance and murder of backpackers in the area, all the while the real killer walks off into the sunset of the Outback free to kill again.
McLean effectively uses Mick in Wolf Creek like any other slasher villain, though knowing the real story of Milat elevates the horror to a scarier, more visceral level. This killer’s not just different from supernatural slashers, or slashers who remain hidden behind a mask, he’s based on a true human monster. Serial killers terrify us so much because they are, more often than not, totally regular people to the outward world. Milat wrought so much terror because, like Mick, he played the good guy role for the people upon whom he preyed, and once his victims figured out his true nature and intentions it was always too late. Wolf Creek and Wolf Creek 2 work as well as they do because they’re not treated as the serial killer biopic we might get if McLean decided to portray Milat as himself, rather than the fictional Mick Taylor. The story becomes a double-edged sword in the way that it can be viewed as just another slasher, effective or not, and the way that, simultaneously, the real life of Milat always lurks on the periphery of nearly every scene. Whether horror is totally fictional, or ripped from the pages of life, it can scare the hell out of us. But there’s no denying horror based in reality can sometimes make our skin crawl to a greater extent, if only for the fact these kinds of killers could be any regular person, and the parallels McLean draws between Mick and Milat are designed to frighten to the bone.
