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‘A potential US distributor,’ recalls director Peter Weir, ‘supposedly threw his coffee cup at the screen at the end of the film, saying, “So whodunnit?” He felt he’d wasted a couple of hours’

One morning in early 1973, the TV personality Patricia Lovell knocked on my door. She was thinking of buying the rights for a novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a story about the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls at an ancient rock formation and she was looking for an up-and-coming director. I had been gripped by the book and was very keen to make it.

Killer Collectibles highlights five of the most exciting new horror products announced each and every week, from toys and apparel to artwork, records, and much more.

Here are the coolest horror collectibles unveiled this week!

Candy Land Blu-ray from Mvd

One of last year’s indie horror standouts, Candy Land is getting a Blu-ray release on February 5 from Mvd and Roxwell Films. Special features include a commentary by director John Swab and a digital zine.

Swab writes and directs. Olivia Luccardi, Sam Quartin, Eden Brolin, Owen Campbell, Virginia Rand, Guinevere Turner, and William Baldwin star.

In her review, Meagan Navarro said “Candy Land gives a refreshing perspective through its condemnation of religion and its positioning of sex workers as protagonists. It’s a more nuanced and lived-in approach to the sleazy slasher format, and its affecting characters elevate the familiar.”

Art the Clown Doll from Living Dead Doll

Terrifier’s...

Mel Gibson will appear in a Q&a ahead of a 40th anniversary screening of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli at this year’s Australian International Screen Forum, which aims to connect the Australian and US industries.

Typically held in New York in partnership with Screen Australia, the 2021 event, planned for late March, will be held entirely online, and consist of screenings, keynotes, interviews, panels, and workshops.

The screening of Weir’s landmark 1981 film, from a National Film and Sound Archive (Nfsa) restored print, will also include an interview with Gibson’s co-star Mark Lee and tributes from on-and-off screen talent.

Weir has endorsed the forum’s tribute to Gallipoli, set across rural Western Australia, a WWI training camp in Cairo and then the battlefront in Turkey.

“The film is a memorial to the men who fought and died at Gallipoli in southern Turkey in 1915,” the director said. “It was inspired...

Film industry stalwart John Cronin has joined the likes of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Russell Boyd and producers Jill Robb and Patricia Lovell in being named The Society of Australian Cinema Pioneers’ National Cinema Pioneer of the Year.

Designed to recognise extraordinary achievements and contributions to the cinema industry, the 2020 award was presented in a ceremony in Adelaide on Sunday evening.

Cronin, who retired in 2017 after a more than 50 year career, tells If he is “delighted” to have received the honour, having been nominated twice previously.

“When I lost the last time, I began to think that I probably wouldn’t get nominated again,” he says.

“My wife, who passed away in July, always used to ask me why other people got awards and I didn’t, so I’m glad my friends got together to make this happen.

“It’s good that I’m able to put it on a bookcase in my living room,...

Chris Thomson, one of the founding directors of the burgeoning New Zealand film and television industry in the 1960s, died in Sydney after a sudden stroke on July 1. He was 70.

Born in Wellington, Thomson directed the first ever drama to air on New Zealand television, A Game for 5 Players, followed by the series The Alpha Plan.

After relocating to the UK in the early 1970s, he worked as a director with the BBC before returning to Australia to direct acclaimed miniseries 1915, Waterfront and The Last Bastion and the feature films The Empty Beach, The Perfectionist and The Delinquents.

He also directed the first ever episode of A Country Practice in 1981. During his long career he worked closely with some of Australia.s finest performers and crew including Jack Thompson, Jacki Weaver, Bryan Brown, Greta Scacchi, Bill Hunter, Sigrid Thornton, Kylie Minogue, Ray Barrett, Andrew McFarlane, Bill Kerr, Lorraine Bayly, Noni Hazlehurst,...

Peter Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is a mesmerizing film. Most who go into it know that it tells a tragic (possibly true) story with no resolution. And so it becomes a slow burn, in which the atmosphere and dread of unseen danger hangs thick in every frame.

Weir broke through on the international film scene with this surprise hit, a film that introduced the world to one of the best directors of the ’80s and ’90s. He would go on to give us more traditional and yet masterful works like “Witness,” “Fearless,” “The Truman Show,” and “Master and Commander” and yet when I hear his name, “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is the first film I think of.

Rating: 4.5/5.0

It is a defiantly bizarre, terrifying film that defies easy categorization or even synopsis. On one hand, it’s a mystery, but it’s one without a conclusion (which notoriously...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: June 17, 2014

Price: Blu-ray/DVD Combo $39.95

Studio: Criterion

A group of young woman mysteriously vanish in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

This sensual and striking chronicle of a disappearance and its aftermath in the 1975 drama-mystery Picnic at Hanging Rock put director Peter Weir (The Way Back) on the map and helped usher in a new era of Australian cinema.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century, Picnic at Hanging Rock concerns a small group of students from an all-female college and a chaperone, who vanish while on a St. Valentine’s Day outing.

Less a mystery than a journey into the mystic, as well as an inquiry into issues of class and sexual repression in Australian society, Weir’s gorgeous, disquieting film is a work of poetic horror whose secrets haunt viewers to this day.

Criterion’s Blu-ray/DVD Combo Edition of the movie includes the...

On Sunday Jacki Weaver was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia. Today the Animal Kingdom and Silver Linings Playbook star was named the recipient of the Aacta Raymond Longford Award.

The actress joins the ranks of previous Longford honourees including directors George Miller, Fred Schepisi and Peter Weir, actors Jack Thompson, Geoffrey Rush and Ray Barrett and producers Tony Buckley, Al Clark, Jan Chapman, Patricia Lovell and Sue Milliken.

Weaver will receive the award, named after cinema pioneer Raymond Longford to recognise individuals who have made outstanding contributions to Australia.s screen culture, at the 3rd Aacta Awards ceremony on Thursday in Sydney.

Her career spans five decades. Her first major acting role was a stage production of Cinderella in 1964, when she was 15. A leading light of the Australian film renaissance, her credits include Stork (1971), Alvin Purple (1973) Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Caddie (1976).

In her international breakthrough, she...

The Sapphires looks set to dominate this year’s Aacta Awards after dominating the categories announced at yesterday’s awards lunch.

The AACTAs – the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts – were held for the first time last year. Yesterday’s lunch at the Star casino in Sydney comes ahead of tomorrow night’s main Aacta ceremony.

The Sapphires won in five of the early categories, including best editing, sound and cinematography.

The event also paid tribute to producer Al Clark with the Raymond Longford Award. Clark was behind films including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Absolute Beginners and Nineteen Eighty Four.

Tributes were also paid to producer Pat Lovell, who died over the weekend. Lovell was a producer on films including Picnic At Hanging Rock and Gallipoli.

The winners:

Aacta Raymond Longford Award

Al Clark

Aacta Award For Best Visual Effects

Iron Sky. Samuli Torssonen, Jussi Lehtiniemi,...