Picnic at Hanging Rock Thoughtfully Realizes Ambiguous Horror

It was supposed to be a day like any other. Isn't that how most horror tales start? But in the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, it really was supposed to be an average day for the students at Appleyard College. It is Valentine's Day in the year 1900 and a whole gaggle of these students is headed off to a picnic near the landmark known as Hanging Rock. While there, a group of students takes off to do some exploring. They're informed by the supervising professor to come back as quickly as possible. Instead of following orders, they immediately vanish. What happened to them? Where did they go? These questions are not the point of Picnic at Hanging Rock, which instead concerns itself with how the various people, like smitten Michael Fitzhubert (Dominic Guard) and college headmaster Mrs. Appleyeard (Rachel Roberts) react to these girls going missing.



There are interesting parallels to be drawn between Picnic at Hanging Rock and fellow 1970s horror classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. True, they're not the exact same movie, with the biggest of these differences being how Chainsaw has more explicit on-screen carnage whereas Hanging Rock makes everything related to murder a suggestion. However, they're both 1970s horror films that take place heavily in broad daylight rather than the darker settings traditionally associated with scary fare. Both titles also open with text that acts like the subsequent fictitious events actually transpired. Chainsaw did this as a response to how U.S. government forces lied to the public about events like Watergate and Vietnam.


Hanging Rock being an Australian film means its choice to blur the line between reality and fiction must have been different. However, I'd imaging writer Cliff Green and director Peter Weir still carried a similar sense of dissatisfaction with how powerful forces were duping the masses when they decided to embrace the conceit of playing this fictional movie as something based in truth. That notion of jumbling together reality with the fictional also informs the camerawork in Picnic at Hanging Rock. In a number of key sequences, Hanging Rock's photography evokes the idea of watching a dream, something ethereal and just out of reach.

This visual approach lends a quietly unnerving quality to the final conversations we see between the girls who would eventually go missing. Such camerawork enhances a chilling quality already laced around the dialogue, like one girl remarking about having an epiphany related to "everything having a place". Further informing the dream-like nature of Picnic at Hanging Rock is the vagueness about what happened to the missing girls. When you wake up from a dream, you never remember how the dream started nor do you remember every detail of the dream. Once you awaken, only fragments of the dream remain in your cranium. Similarly, we only get pieces of what happened to this quartet (eventually trio since one of them is recovered) of women.

Meanwhile, the lack of a clear explanation for their abrupt vanishing similarly feeds into how dreams tend to eschew the rules of reality. It's impossible for a group of people to just go missing without a trace just like so much of what passes for normals in our own dreams. This chimeric aesthetic is brought to life through cinematography by Russell Boyd that heavily emphasizes natural light. Much like last years Midsommar or the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the brightness of daytime can provide the perfect accompaniment to certain horror stories. In this case, the use of daylight in Picnic at Hanging Rock makes the disappearance of these girls all the more shocking. These characters don't occupy a monochromatic film noir world that's constantly poised for misery. They live in a world full of lush foliage straight out of a postcard. How could something terrible happen here?

Ah, but terrible things do transpire in Picnic at Hanging Rock, including in how people react to this shocking turn of events. The third act of Hanging Rock tends to depict these reactions in very apparent terms, a choice that works thanks to how ambiguous Hanging Rock has kept its story up to this point. Definitively showing students torment the lone survivor of the group of missing girls or especially that climactic shot of Sara's corpse laying facedown in the greenhouse have an especially disturbing quality because it's the first time Hanging Rock is laying bare the awfulness of the world. What was once hidden by mystery is now on display for viewers to see. This choice results in some truly unsettling imagery but it also reinforces the level of thought that's gone into the remarkable horror film Picnic at Hanging Rock.