Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!: Lake Mungo (2008) - Anderson's bone-chilling mockumentary horror

10/25/2018

Lake Mungo (2008) - Anderson's bone-chilling mockumentary horror

♥♥♥♥

+ Best Horror Movie of the Year + Best Mockumentary of the Year + Best Australian Movie of the Year

A disturbing, distorted video feed in B/W provides the background for this poster for Joel Anderson's Lake Mungo

Teenage girl Alice drowns in a lake in a tragic accident, which haunts her parents and brother for years after. - But are they also actually haunted by her ghost, and if so, is it trying to tell them something...?

Lake Mungo is written and directed by feature-debuting Joel Anderson (The Rotting Woman (2002, short)). It is a successful mockumentary horror, which manages to create a realistic scenario and manipulate skillfully with us its audience.
A large part of the reason it works is good casting and acting from the cast of unknowns, paired with a very strong and nerveracking score by David Paterson, who, incredibly, hasn't made another score before or since.
Several sequences in Lake Mungo, - which drives on the fear of a parallel spirit world and souls living on among us, - are very frightening. The real Australian Mungo location is used handily towards the film's conclusion.
One reservation that might be raised against Lake Mungo is that the family it revolves around seems to circle as if spellbound around their lost daughter and sister even years after her demise.

Related posts:

2008 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2008 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2008 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: Reportedly 1.1 mil. $
Box office: 29k A$, approximately 20k $ (Australia)
= Box office disaster (returned 0.18 times the cost)
[Lake Mungo premiered 18 June (Sydney Film Festival, Australia) and runs 89 minutes. Anderson deliberately wrote a low-budget script, which he has described as an "exploration of grief". The script had no dialog, so the actors had to improvise. Shooting took place in Australia in 5 weeks. The film's only listed gross is from its country of origin Australia. Beside this, it was only screened at festivals in 4 other markets. Anderson has not returned with anything since. Lake Mungo is fresh at 93 % with a 7.4/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Lake Mungo?

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Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!

Eagerly anticipating this week ... (6-24)

10/25/2018

Lake Mungo (2008) - Anderson's bone-chilling mockumentary horror

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