Long Weekend is a strange, unsettling Australian horror movie from the 70s. I can’t quite recall how I heard of it, although I remember coming across it this past summer when The Museum of Modern Art included the film in its ten-week-long program of horror movies. Around that time I happened to see a submission call for essays on places of terror and nature’s revenge in media, and I’d been wanting to find an interesting topic to write about. I thought about Long Weekend, and even though I’d yet to see the film, thought it sounded like it could work for that essay topic. I figured it might be obscure enough that others might not choose to write about it, so I rented the film from Netflix and hoped that I’d like it enough to write about it! I’m still putting together my essay, but in the meantime, I thought it would be good to gather my thoughts here as well. If you’d like to avoid spoilers of the film, then you should probably not read on, as I do talk about specific scenes.
Animal Attack Film Trend of the 1970s
Animal attack films were hugely popular in the 1970s; most notably, the decade gave us 1975’s Jaws. But the film that kicked off the trend was actually 1971’s Willard, which stars many rats who were trained by the titular character to attack until finally turning on Willard himself. The following year the film’s sequel, Ben, was released, and Willard would later be remade in 2003. A few other animals-gone-rogue films of the time period are Orca and Day of the Animals (both released in 1977) and 1972’s Frogs, although they are by no means the only ones. My personal favorite of this kind of film is 1980’s Alligator, which came at the tail end of the trend. Of course, genre films about animals are still being made today, it’s just not in the mainstream like it was back in the 70s. Perhaps we will see a boon in animal attack films with the upcoming 2023 release of Cocaine Bear.
How Long Weekend sets itself apart from other animal attack films
Unlike films such as Jaws or Orca, there is no one singular animal “villain” in Long Weekend. There are a few animals that specifically appear, with the most important one being a dugong, but the threat is everywhere. The villain is vague and omnipresent. In the typical horror film in which a human is a killer, we often get scenes from their point of view, as they close in as their victim. Instead, Nature itself is portrayed as the threat, with images of frightening weather and sounds of animals at night. But what’s significant in Long Weekend is that nature is actually not a villain. Nature is defending herself from callous, selfish humans in the form of our main characters. Generally, the audience is supposed to be at least somewhat sympathetic to the characters. (Personally, I was rooting for the killer whale in Orca…) Yet in Long Weekend, the main characters – who are the only people we see in the film in a significant way – are not people we are rooting for at all.
Why Nature Attacks
Long Weekend follows a couple, Marcia and Pete, who are constantly at each other’s throats. They constantly bicker and there’s clearly bad blood between them, which involves a past affair and an abortion. (The film’s stance on pro-life or pro-choice is not something I’ll be exploring in this blog.) When we initially meet the characters, Peter appears to be flirty with an unknown woman. As we soon find out he’s actually married to someone else, we immediately get the sense he is of bad moral character. Our first introduction to Marcia is at home, tending to her plants, and then handles a frozen chicken mindlessly in the kitchen. During their first interaction, when Peter arrives at the home, he points his gun at her. He plans on bringing it on their weekend camping trip. If it seems as if Marcia isn’t that bad of a person, just wait – a few minutes into the film, we see her trying to justify leaving their dog, Cricket, behind instead of taking her with them on the trip. Marcia insists Cricket would be fine outside, for days, with merely a bowl of food. Cricket does end up on the trip with them, although the dog will not ultimately escape the couple’s lack of care.
Throughout the film, the couple’s disregard for the environment and wildlife is repeatedly shown. On the drive to the campsite, while Marcia is sleeping, Peter runs over a kangaroo. He’s shown driving recklessly and impatiently, which demonstrates his disregard for anyone else’s safety. When he later tells her what happened with the kangaroo, she has no reaction. We see Peter litter when he throws a lit cigarette out the van’s window, and it starts a fire. By the time the couple arrives at the campsite, I hated them and couldn’t wait to see how nature would exact her revenge. It’s slow to take place, but revenge does occur.
In one of the most egregious displays of cruelty, Marcia destroys an eagle’s egg. Later, the eagle would physically attack Peter. It’s one of the only scenes in which an animal directly interacts with the couple. Peter continuously shows his disregard toward nature in actions such as chopping down trees. When Marcia asked him why he’s chopping the tree down, he replies, “Why not?”
Sadly, it’s this kind of attitude that makes the film’s message still relevant today. Ask anyone who litters, wastes water or electricity, or eats animals, and they’ll probably give you the same answer as Peter.
During the film, we also see a couple of nods to domesticated but exploited animals. For example, when Peter is asking for directions to the campsite, one of the locals gives him advice using an abattoir as a landmark. The frozen chicken that Marcia packed for their trip becomes spoiled and left to rot, showing how their carelessness leads to a waste of a life. At the end of the film, the truck that kills Peter was carrying livestock on their way to the abattoir, the driver momentarily distracted by cockatoos who flew into his truck.
In one of her many outbursts, Marcia yells at Peter about dragging her to the “ugly, awful” campsite. Nothing about the environment is ugly or awful; the campsite is in a forest along a beach, and the opening shots of the film show an environment full of beauty and color. However, as the plot progresses, the color palette is drained of vibrancy. Marcia sees what she wants to see, and doesn’t allow herself to be open to the experience of nature. She doesn’t care about anything but herself and her marital problems, although she doesn’t seem to want to resolve them. Peter wants to use nature but doesn’t care about how he goes about it. Even his dog, who he seemingly does care about, is left behind when Peter prioritizes his own safety and escaping alone over escaping with his beloved pet. Despite his gun, Peter is defenseless. That’s the intriguing part of having a villain be nature itself – it’s everywhere, yet there’s nothing really to shoot at. In a sick twist foreshadowed by the film’s beginning, Peter accidentally shoots and kills Marcia while aimlessly firing into the night.
The Dugong
The eeriest part of the film that suggests the supernatural is the dugong. At night, we hear the cries of one. It’s haunting, and Peter makes a direct comparison between the cries of the dugong to the cries of a human baby. Peter explains to Marcia that dugongs used to be more prevalent but the oil industry killed them off. In the film, Peter contributes to the dugong’s decline by shooting one. They mistook the creature for a shark, and even though neither characters were in actual danger, Peter shot into the ocean, killing the dugong. Her body washes up on the shore. For the remainder of the film, the supposedly dead dugong somehow moves closer and closer to their campsite. The dugong becomes a symbol of dread and for how nature’s revenge is coming closer and closer. For Marcia and Peter, is no escaping judgment and punishment.
Long Weekend may be one of many eco-horror films of the 70s, but it stands out for its unique approach in its characterization and in depicting nature’s revenge.