In North America, the name John Bunting isn’t particularly well known. But in Australia, his name continues to instil a sense of dread in those who were alive during his gruesome streak of murders, to the point the residents of Snowtown – where Bunting and his partner in crime Robert Wagner killed one victim and stored the bodies of eight others – at one time considered changing the name of the town. Dark tourism brought a momentary boost in the local economy of Snowtown after the murders, but it marked the place as a site of brutal suffering, and many residents worried the notoriety would forever remain a stain on their home.
In 2011, the Australian film Snowtown (also known as The Snowtown Murders) was released. Directed by Justin Kurzel and written by Shaun Grant, the film uses social realism akin to British kitchen sink dramas from the 1950s and 1960s crossed with serial killer horror in order to paint a picture of Bunting, his crimes, and, above all, how he managed to commit them. Although Wagner, in reality, was an equal partner in the killings, Bunting is the focus of Snowtown. The story unravels Bunting’s dominant and brutal personality in order to examine how he came to manipulate a number of poor, disadvantaged people into helping him murder, or into being murder victims themselves.
Bunting – a working class lad himself, once an abattoir worker who bragged happily about how much he loved his job slaughtering animals – posed as saviour to the lower class residents of a poor Adelaide suburb, many of whom were concerned for their children who’d been taken advantage of and sexually abused. First, Bunting started a relationship with a woman called Elizabeth Harvey— the mother of several sons, whose latest boyfriend takes pictures of the boys naked. Then, John became close to one of Elizabeth’s oldest sons, Jamie Vlassakis, one of his later accomplices. John aided in running off the pedophile boyfriend. Afterwards, he ,made Jamie and others in the neighbourhood – including Mark Haydon, one of the men later charged for the Snowtown killings – help him with more sinister tasks.
Something Kurzel did to heighten the film’s realism is employ a cast of nearly all non-professional actors. Aside from Bunting (played by Daniel Henshall) and Barry Lane (played by Richard Green), the rest of the characters are portrayed by people who’ve never acted before. Kurzel did his casting in Davoren Park, South Australia, a well known suburban area full of low income housing and a place where emergency vehicles won’t go without the police. Louise Harris, who plays Elizabeth Harvey, was actually unemployed when she was cast in the film. Because Kurzel went to these lengths, Snowtown’s lower class characters feel like real people, rather than characters. Because Davoren Park is around the area where the actual murders occurred, there’s an extra sense of realism in their own personal histories coming from this place. The story – known in Australia as the Snowtown Murders, or the Bodies in Barrels Murders – is embedded in their local culture, regardless of any actual personal connection. There’s a raw quality to the acting of these non-professionals which helps Grant’s screenplay come alive in ways it might not were the lines spoken by professional actors. The screenplay itself is the source of realism, focusing on the character and psychology of Bunting. Moreover, the producers of the film were finally able to get a judge to lift suppression orders on the details of the case in effect since the trial, so Grant had the luxury of consulting the recorded facts to write his screenplay with as much realism as possible.
Grant’s screenplay focuses heavily on the early days of Bunting ingratiating himself to Elizabeth and her family. This is an important aspect of the entire film, because it lulls the audience into the same sense of comfort and complacency as those who were around Bunting. He appears outwardly as chivalrous, just, and tough. He romances Elizabeth, then he cooks breakfast and supper for the boys. Best of all, he’s ruthless in his mission to protect children. He stresses himself as better, more efficient than the police. In one scene, people sit around the kitchen table boasting of what they would do to child molesters were they given a chance. John goes on to compare his murderous work to ANZAC – the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps – which reveals a messianic view of himself as a strongman, and the only one able to truly protect the people of Adelaide. With a smirk, he asks the table: “Where’s my fucking parade?”
The real life Bunting was, in fact, once a neo-Nazi in his teen years. Apparently the ideology never quite washed off. Snowtown’s screenplay focuses on this by casually unveiling the ugly ideology Bunting carried over from white supremacy into his career as a serial killer. Initially, he’s only concerned with pedophiles. While only vaguely touched on, at eight years old the real Bunting was beaten and sexually assaulted by a friend’s older brother— child molestation was clearly a highly personal issue. However, as time wore on, his worldview shaped his pool of victims. He went from wanting to kill pedophiles to marking others he considered deviant for murder: gay men (whom he equated to pedophiles), junkies, and the mentally disabled.
Barry – a gay man who crossdresses – is the one who aids Bunting and Wagner by giving them a list of known pedophiles and rapists. The real Barry Lane was actually once the significant other of Wagner. The film’s deleted scenes touch on this actual relationship, though the finished film only alludes to it briefly for a solitary shot. Part of the deterioration in the choice of victims for Bunting and Wagner points to the latter’s hypocritical tendencies. Obviously Wagner was closeted, and for him to follow along with John’s disdain for gay men further speaks to the dominance Bunting wielded over everybody— his fellow serial killing partner included.
There’s a different brand of hypocrisy about Bunting. He treated the lower class people of Adelaide as cogs in a machine, using them to get what he wanted. Whereas Elizabeth’s pedophile boyfriend molested Jamie, Bunting used Jamie to help him commit some of the killings, even that of his own step-brother Troy, who had raped Jamie. The evolution of Jamie from a quiet young man into an accomplice to horrific murder is representative of John’s abusive ways. He grooms Jamie as a killer in the same way a pedophile grooms a child for sex. He starts off chopping kangaroos to bits to toss on a molester’s house, enlisting Jamie to help. Another scene depicts him forcing Jamie to shoot his dog, all in order to desensitize him to the killings they will go on to commit eventually. When Troy is targeted by Bunting and Wagner later, Jamie is the one to ultimately kill him, though more as an act of mercy than a malicious killing. Part of this manipulation of people from disadvantaged areas where not only is the economy deteriorated but the authorities and their institutions care little about the citizens, is also due to the extreme boredom of being poor. This boredom is dangerous in and of itself when an influence like Bunting emerges.
A telling scene involves Bunting and Wagner digging a massive hole in the backyard of Elizabeth’s house. Everyone sits around drinking, smoking, and chatting, like they’re digging a hole to install a pool. In reality, it’s a hole for bodies. Most of them know, though one guy hanging around doesn’t, so John teases him by claiming he’ll be putting an addition onto the house— the joke being, nobody there is wealthy enough to do simple renovations, let alone put a whole new piece on their house. Here, Kurzel and Grant subtly expose how the quest for safety which originally drove these people transformed into almost a form of entertainment. Small town life is often painted as a haven for bad things to fester. Just as often it’s forgotten that sometimes people aren’t evil, or even bad, they’re just bored. In turn, boredom can lead people into becoming bad, which is exactly what happened to Jamie as he fell into the clutches of Bunting’s grasp.
There are several scenes where small town boredom infiltrates all the macabre, serving to show Bunting’s enjoyment in his actions. Another scene involving boredom is when Bunting goes to see a woman whose backyard trailer is occupied by a sex offender. Jamie goes to intimidate the man. During this time, Bunting is fed a sandwich while the woman takes off her clothes and dances naked slowly for him. The look on Bunting’s face as he watches her, simultaneously eating his sandwich, is symbolic of his manipulation. He looks totally disinterested yet he has her strip simply because he can. An eerie parallel is John’s abuse and that of Elizabeth’s former pedophile boyfriend. While the woman dances naked, John orders her in a monotone, bored voice: “Turn around.” This is the exact same command the boyfriend gave to Jamie while taking pictures of him naked. The juxtaposition of different forms of abuse helps us see more of how Bunting was, first and foremost, concerned with power and control. His specific form of vengeance made him feel like a god amongst the lower class people around him, not hard to see even in how Bunting seems to amuse himself. Nevertheless, his assertion of dominance often wasn’t amusing.
A powerful, disturbing scene sees John in the backyard with one of Jamie’s younger brothers, whom he appears to punish. He makes the boy wear a skirt and blouse, stand on a lawn chair, then hold his arms out with bricks in his hands— a combination of emotional and physical abuse. He never sexually abuses any of the boys, but he’s still abusive. Again, the look on his face is half disinterested, half amused, and the punishment takes on an even more sinister face, as a part of it gives Bunting enjoyment.
Grant chose to leave out a significant aspect of the murders, one that perfectly sums up a play-like treatment of killing. Bunting and Wagner began playing the song “Selling the Drama” by Live from the album Throwing Copper as they murdered their victims. In terms of the film, this was surely omitted due to rights issues and money, considering the production only had a budget around $2.5-million. Despite that, it’s a shame this couldn’t have been worked into a scene, as it illustrates more how Bunting viewed the murders as enjoyable, and at the same time they were made them into rituals for the serial killer.
The main poster for Snowtown features the character of Jamie in the foreground, and directly behind him, slightly obscured, is John, lurking barely visible with a smirk on his face. Throughout the film, there are similar shots, such as when John makes Jamie impersonate a mentally ill man they murdered to collect on his welfare benefits and drug prescriptions. This image epitomizes Bunting’s manipulation: behind the scenes and pulling the strings of everyone, in particular Jamie. Every little thing Bunting did was an act of manipulation, or in service of gaining more power over those he was pretending to protect. This predatory image is in parallel to another, of a feeding snake. One of the final victims in the film is a mentally disabled man, who happens to own a snake. Bunting, Jamie, and Wagner are about to kill him, as he feeds his snake and lets them watch. The snake grabs a mouse and pulls it into his grip, then slowly squeezes the life from it, swallowing it whole. The snake, like Bunting, totally controls its prey. Bunting is a predator, but, unlike the snake, he preys and kills for the sake of it, not to feed. The one saving grace is, in real life, Jamie refused to be swallowed whole like the mouse, and during the court trial became a key witness against Bunting, as well as Wagner.
Snowtown explores the way the disadvantaged are prey to all kinds of abuses, be they physical, emotional, or sexual. Through the portrayal of Bunting in the screenplay, we come to understand how he was capable of wielding such power even after people around him came to regret their responsibility in the murderous ordeal. The social realism of the film adds weight to the story, allowing the audience to confront the relentless abuses of lower class people, perpetrated not just by the government and societal institutions, but also by their own. In certain ways it’s the latter abuses, by other poor and disadvantaged people, that leaves those of the lower class more susceptible to manipulation and violence.
 perfectly highlights the ways that pure boredom of the lowercase is an avenue to forms of abuse.){kind=link}