I really shouldn’t have ended the night with Picnic at Hanging Rock. I forgot how haunting and downright unsettling the film is. If you haven’t seen it, I strongly recommend that you rectify that. It’s some classic cinema, for one, and it’s one of the most effective horror films I’ve ever seen.
The story itself is simple: In 1900, a group of Australian schoolgirls go for a picnic lunch at Hanging Rock to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Four girls go off exploring and three of them fail to return. A teacher who goes off to find them vanishes as well.
The film is unsettling because it never addresses what happened to the girls. Strange phenomena surround the Rock. Watches stop, animals act strangely, and unusual weather phenomena are observed. Perhaps most unsettling of all is the fact that one of the girls, Miranda, seems to have known she wasn’t going to come back from Hanging Rock that day.
The film is based on a novel, and apparently it caused quite a stir when it first came out. It was an international best-seller and many people wanted to know what happened to the missing girls. Strangely, the author never intended for it to be a mystery. A final chapter detailing what happened to the girls was removed at the request of the publisher who thought it better to preserve the mystery. It was later restored after the author’s death. I re-read the final chapter last night and it still stands up as some pretty freaky stuff.
In a funny twist, the author, after being asked by her publisher to cut that chapter, incorporated some of the scenes and dialogue into the chapter in which the girls disappear. So for those who wonder what happened, they can read portions of it in the existing book, or see it in the film, when the girls enter a clearing and talk about seeing a strange red mist and small figures moving at the base of the rock. Miranda then delivers her creepy final line: “Everything begins and ends at the exactly right time and place.” Then the girls exit stage left, and exit the world.
One of the reasons I like the film so much is because I believe horror works best when it’s subtle, and even at its strangest, Picnic at Hanging Rock maintains an almost patrician dignity. This is a terrible tragedy, but we’re going to figure out what happened. Unfortunately the answers never come, and things fall apart as a result. I think the best horror films are those that take place in the real world. You take a completely ordinary occurrence, in this case a bunch of schoolgirls on a picnic, and then you tweak it ever so slightly, you give it just a small push off the tracks, and see what happens. Four girls go exploring, okay, nothing special there, they’re living in a stuffy college where they never get to cut loose, that makes sense. But then… oh, only one of them comes back. Okay, they lost track of time – their watches stopped working, right? – but the teacher will find them (and probably give them a stropping when they get back to school). Oh, she disappeared, too. Um, now I’m getting a little scared.
Another reason I liked this film is because I’ve always been interested in paranormal disappearances (and reappearances), Picnic at Hanging Rock isn’t the first film to tackle the subject, but it may be the best of the bunch.
So, if you can find the film (it’s available as a swanky Criterion Collection DVD) or, even better, the book, I suggest you pick it up. If you want to find out what happened to the girls, I suggest you also seek out The Secret of Hanging Rock, which features the deleted final chapter.
I’ve had an idea bouncing around for a “paranormal disappearance” story, set at the Petroglyphs Provincial Park, north of Peterborough, which has the largest known concentration of Aboriginal stone carvings in Canada. I think it would be a good setting for it. I’ll see if Kat wants to take a drive up there next weekend.
I don’t think I want to go alone.
