Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Themes of Horror

Picnic at Hanging Rock is often cited as a horror film, as one of the greatest ever made. Yet, it is conspicuous in that nearly nothing happens and most of what happens is never explained. It is an ethereal mystery. The mystery strikes chords. Like the titular Hanging Rock, the film plays the atavistic strands of the human psyche like the strings of a zither.

1. Dignity and the Flesh

The film's main concern is the clash of Victorian English formality with the mystically primal, untamed, overbearingly natural world of Australia. The girls of the all-girl school are seen corseting up for the day, pulling one another's laces tight. When told they would be going to Hanging Rock, they are given the promise that, if it is warm enough, they shall be permitted to remove their gloves.

Throughout the history of Western culture, humanity has had to straddle the border between animal and something unrecognizable in the animal world. Traditionally this has been treated literally: humans have souls, animals don't; humans are between animals and angels, sharing the nature of both; humans have a spark of god, whereas animals are like humans without the divine spark. More recently this is seen as merely the product of intelligence, whereby humans have developed ways of treating one another as beings deserving respect. Even without the religion, the notion of humans as deserving respect above and beyond mere animals persists.

This conceit has born fruits for both good and ill. While the view that humans have special dignity gives rise to morality, manners, and spirituality of all forms, it has also yielded as oppressive forms as Victorian manners, Islamic treatment of women, Christian fear of sexuality, and the general body-hatred that pervades Western spirituality. This is the direct result of privileging the apparently 'angelic' nature of humanity above the 'animal' nature; an approach at least as old as Socrates.

This theme has been perhaps the most pertinent to the horror genre. The very motive force behind the horror genre is the conviction that humanity is special and should not be butchered, violated, or treated without dignity and respect. The perpetrators of horror in these films, however, insist upon treating the human being as just another animal, from Dr. Caligari's experiments on humans to the visceral butchering in films like Saw. Had we not already agreed within ourselves beforehand that the victims deserve better and do have human dignity, there would be no horror film, but a calculable coherence of special effect and technique to be gauged in cold detachment.

It is this special problem of the angel-animal that afflicts the girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock, who are purposely shot in soft focus in their white dresses while at the bottom of the rock in order to appear angelic. Squished into the oppressive Victorian views of the body, with particular care for sexuality, the girls have been brought to a land formation more ancient than any human cultural form and for that reason resonating with the certain mysterious quality of primal, animal nature, close to the rocks, the earth, the physical reality of the environment around them and within them.

The higher the girls ascend the rock, the more they strip themselves of their cumbersome but ever-so-proper costumes and become more animal. They run barefoot out of sight and most are never seen again. One appears again, at an impossible interval later, completely dressed, with only her corset mysteriously gone. The doctors and women use some euphemisms--"Is she intact?" "Yes, she's intact"--to imply she has not been violated sexually. Perhaps she has been violated on a more spiritual level; we're never told. Nor are we told where the other girls have gone; it is as if their new-found freedom, the explosion of the deep, primal, animal natures breaking free from limiting forms, made their existence impossible in the oppressive world at the bottom of the rock.

2. An Unstable World

If the conflict between animal nature and human dignity is one of the major horror themes, not far behind is the encounter of an essentially unstable world. The films of Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, and other ethereal horror films proceed not on the premise that there is a monster in the world, but that the world itself is somehow monstrous, disordered, or ordered in a way entirely unsympathetic to the human individual.

The girls who disappear at Hanging Rock, along with their governess, are never seen again. The one girl who does return is inexplicably alive and well, without any cuts on her bare feet, without her corset on, though her dress has not been removed. Before vanishing, the girls seemed propelled forward, as if in a frenzy, not unlike Euripides Bacchae. The governess and these girls were seen to be removing their clothes. A pink cloud was witnessed in the area. The watches stopped upon arriving at the rock. Some locals boys watched the girls obsessively, as if they were pixies.

This sounds like the ground for a great mystery film. A scientist-detective should enter from another movie and solve the mystery, pipe in hand. This does not happen. The sum of the clues does not equal any solution. They are so many red herrings. Because there is no answer. The ultimate truth of the film is that the universe is ultimately unstable, both metaphysically and epistemologically: It is in itself unstable and we are also unable to understand it.

Despite a society that tries to exercise such control of its members and their nature, that believes it has the physical world mapped out and understood in its entirety, the mystical properties of the world rebel and shattered the illusion. The girls throw off their forms and run free; the girls disappear without a trace; the headmistress begins drinking; all facts about the instability of the world, of which humans are a part, just as unstable. Perhaps we too will just disappear.

To sum up, what makes Picnic at Hanging Rock the horror classic it is is not any actual horror, but a mystery that essentially involves the most basic themes of horror and exploits them in possibly the purest, if airiest, manner cinematically possible.