Day 29: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is a horror story in the most unconventional sense. Never about ghosts, goblins, or ghouls, the true intensity and terror revolves around the idea of the unknown. It is this absence of solid facts and resolution that can gnaw at us in a situation and send us flailing for support where there is none. It can turn us into desperate beings, searching for answers to unanswerable questions and it can pit us against one another instead of uniting us in our similar pain. With such a interesting and cerebral concept, this little Australian film took America (and the world for that matter) by storm, both intriguing and frustrating audiences everywhere.

The film tells the tale of an English all-girl’s school, residing in the 1900′s Australian bush, that must deal with the disappearance of three of their students and one of their teachers during a picnic at “Hanging Rock,” a well known landscape formation. At first, the disappearances are considered tragic, but a hope still remains that the missing will be found and, whether uncovered dead or alive, at least resolution will come to the school and mourning can take place. But, as time drags on, this hope diminishes and a feeling of chaos and uncertainty sets into the school, coming to a unnerving climax when one of the lost girls reappears, but remembers nothing of what has occurred.

Through “Picnic at Hanging Rock”  Peter Weir creates an entirely new mood in horror, swapping the normalcy of shock in the genre for a very slow burn effect of frustration that he only allows to culminate once in the third act of the film. While typical horror either leads to answers about the antagonist or brings about its demise entirely, “Hanging Rock” uses the absence of resolution as its foil and, because of this, we are left with a dramatic structure devoid a true “movie ending”.

The film also dives into the idea of the “left unsaid” when portraying the people both studying and working in the all-girls school. There is one student in particular named Sarah, who is secretly in love with one of the girls missing and finds herself always at the mercy of the headmistress. Though it is never implied that the headmistress knows of Sarah’s sexual preference, the extremes to which she punishes the poor girl over simple things leads one to suspect that she sees something in Sarah in which she herself relates to and strives to condemn.

In fact, much in the film can be said about sexual frustration. The events of the disappearance take place on Saint Valentine’s day for one and, as the students go about their picnic, two boys stumble upon the party and watch from a distance, ogling at the girls and their figures. Later, when the one girl reappears, she seems completely fine beyond normal scraps and bruises, but, oddly enough, her corset, for which she had on at the picnic, has gone missing upon her reappearance. As the film continues on, this overshadowing amount of sexual frustration broadens into anger over the disappearances and, with a Master’s stroke, Weir only continues to tease us through the credits without giving either the school or his audience much relief.

But it is in this frustration that we are allowed to be terrified. We are all scared, in one way or the other, about the future, the unknown, and “Picnic at Hanging Rock” wisely uses this fear against us in such an artful way that we leave the film more disturbed than scared- our minds left racing in a maddening and fruitless chase for resolution that does not exist.

For more on “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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