10 Best Wilderness Horror Movies

Released in 2005, director Greg McLean's Wolf Creek soon got swept up in the torture porn moral panic of the time as reviewers pondered whether the film's gory content was justified by its plot.

Said plot being the gripping and harrowing ordeal of some backpackers who were hunted and murdered by a xenophobic killer. Hard to imagine how much more justifiable screen violence could ever be, really.

This intense outback thriller provided the wilderness horror sub genre with one of its most memorably simple monsters in the form of John Jarrat's unforgettably jovial hitchhiker killer. A sadistic monster, the villain's heartless cruelty is made all the more unwatchable-y brutal by Jarrat's jarringly friendly tone and agreeable manner, as the actor subverts decades of cuddly onscreen personae in one terrifying turn.

A grim and upsetting experience, this one won't be for everyone. But for fans of sheer endurance test survival horror, it does get much more brutally unrelenting and disarmingly simple than this twisted tale.