10 Best Slasher Movies Since 2000

If you were disappointed by the recent mini-series, then there’s never been a better time to revisit the original Wolf Creek, which unlike its TV equivalent maintains the mystique surrounding Mick Taylor (John Jarrett). There are no flashbacks to Mick’s messed up childhood here, no psychobabble and the movie avoids the trite is-he-dead-or-isn’t-he ending.

Greg McLean’s debut feature is so potent, in fact, that the film’s Australian release had to be delayed lest its story of a psychopath hunting tourists in the outback influence the trial of an Australian accused of murdering a British backpacker. Had the movie been a stylized gorefest about a masked lunatic with a chainsaw, it wouldn’t have been half as controversial.

Jarrett once fronted a TV gardening programme, which is curiously apt because when we first meet him, Mick is playing to an audience, gaining their trust with his superficial charm and old school know-how before allowing his mask to drop. In a movie with no shortage of disquieting moments, it’s a toss-up which moment is the most unnerving – the sequence where the backpackers realize Mick’s true intentions or his casual threats of violence, including turning one girl into a “head on a stick.”