Night of Fear (Australia, 1973)

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a soft spot for the Ozploitation films of the ’70s. I’ve reviewed Patrick and Thirst in earlier October Horror Movie Challenges, and I enjoyed both immensely. And so I was delighted to see a couple more Ozploitation flicks pop up on Shudder recently. While I’d never heard of Night of Fear, the reviews I scanned made it sound intriguing. And that was enough to get it on the list.

Night of Fear is currently streaming on Shudder in the UK.

Synopsis

There isn’t much plot to Night of Fear. It’s less than an hour long, with a tiny cast and no dialogue. Most of the film simply involves a young woman running through rainforest, trying to evade a lone hunter who has gone feral. None of the characters in this film have names, so we’ll just call the hunter “the man” and the woman “the woman”.

Just to confuse things, the man is hunting a different woman when we first encounter him. He herds her towards the squalid farmhouse where he lives. Once she is trapped inside, the man pulls a hidden level and we see no more of her.

We then see a longer version of this cycle play out after our protagonist is accidentally driven off the road by a lorry. She finds herself on a private road in the forest, but drives her car into a pit trap. The man arrives, sporting a rat on his shoulder, and proceeds to hunt her as well. She tries a few clever ploys to escape, but the man is too persistent.

This woman also ends up trapped in the man’s house, but this time we get to see what kinds of horror lie inside. Things are probably not going to end well for her.

General Thoughts

I can imagine Night of Fear making an interesting double-bill with In a Violent Nature. While the two films are incredibly different in tone, they both follow a series of cat-and-mouse games through woodland, relying almost entirely on visual storytelling.

Night of Fear was originally intended as the pilot for an anthology horror show called Fright. This explains the short runtime and the title montage, which absolutely feels like the intro to a 1970s TV programme. The plinky, discordant synthesiser soundtrack could also only come from television of this era. When Fright fell through, Night of Fear was given a cinema release, although it faced major problems with the censors.

Verdict

I found Night of Fear more interesting as a cultural artefact than as a horror movie. Any number of people have pointed out how it resembles The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, despite Night of Fear predating Tobe Hooper’s masterpiece by a couple of years. The violence and gore here feel ahead of their time, with the kind of griminess and sadism that earlier films generally lacked. There is plenty of meat, blood, and decay to evoke disgust, using real animal carcasses and in a way you don’t really see anymore.

This is the raw essence of the backwoods horror genre, stripped of dialogue or exposition, leaving only action and bloodshed. Even with what is effectively a prologue, the script doesn’t waste time establishing anything. We go straight into the first hunt and things rarely slow down from there. And these hunts are pretty creepy, especially considering the first three quarters of the film takes place in daylight. At least the final act takes place at night, otherwise the title would be completely ironic.

Even with its minimal plot, Night of Fear barely sustains its 53-minute runtime, however. While it’s certainly tense and nasty, there is only so much running around in the forest you can watch before it all blurs together. There aren’t the kind of point-of-view switches In a Violent Nature used to keep things fresh, but the tone does at least shift when the woman takes shelter inside the man’s house. And the sheer unpleasantness of the ending makes it all feel worthwhile.

I’d only really recommend Night of Fear to horror fans with an interest in the history of the genre. While it’s an entertaining enough watch, and short enough not to outstay its welcome, it doesn’t offer much that feels new these days.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on Twitter, BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (USA, 2021)
Tales That Witness Madness (UK, 1973)
When Evil Lurks (Argentina, 2023)
Under Paris (France, 2024)
In a Violent Nature (Canada, 2024)
Torso (Italy, 1973)
Titane (France, 2021)
Rorschach (USA, 2015)
The Coffee Table (Spain, 2024)
Dr Caligari (USA, 1989)
Bit (USA, 2020)
The Guard From Underground (Japan, 1992)
Oddity (Ireland, 2024)
Speak No Evil (Denmark/Netherlands, 2022)
Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (USA, 1982)
Grave Torture (Indonesia, 2024)
Bedlam (USA, 1946)
The Innsmouth School For Girls (USA, 2023)
Daddy’s Head (UK, 2024)
All You Need Is Death (Ireland, 2024)
Eight Eyes (USA/Serbia, 2021)
Poor Things (Ireland/UK/USA, 2023)
Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye (Italy, 1973)
Longlegs (USA, 2024)
Night of Fear (Australia, 1973)
Stopmotion (UK, 2024)
Terrifier (USA, 2016)
Azrael (USA, 2024)
Faust (Germany, 1926)
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (Hong Kong, 1991)
I Saw the TV Glow (USA, 2024)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.