Welcome to a different kind of horror.
This post explores how to write a horror film with no monster—at least not in any sort of conventional sense.
Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971)–a film that Nick Cave calls “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence”–demonstrates how setting, situation, atmosphere, and psychology can become the antagonistic force.
The film is a deeply unsettling experience where the horror grows not from a queasy sense of place–but more importantly, what that place can turn a person into.
Let’s explore how Wake in Fright succeeds at this on three levels:
First, Environmental Horror – making place and circumstance the villain
Second, Atmospheric Horror – building dread from vibe, not violence
Third, Psychological Horror – turning the protagonist into his own enemy
And of course we’ll look at exercises you can use to apply this place-based horror logic to your own screenplay.
It is a bit strange to say there’s “no monster” in Wake in Fright. There is certainly something terrifying happening. But that something is the place itself. The outback town of Bundanyabba (“the Yabba”) becomes a spiritual trap, its dust-coated streets and cheery locals drawing the protagonist John Grant deeper and deeper into its pit of despair.
Yet unlike traditional horror environments, the Yabba isn’t trying to scare you.
It is living its life. It is behaving exactly the way it’s meant to.
The horror emerges from the protagonist’s inability to coexist with the Yabba. He is an outsider. He resists the Yabba and its “backward” ways. He mocks the Yabba. He tries to escape the Yabba. And for that sin, he is punished.
Grant is an outsider. He the Yabba as a simple train stop. He must stay for one overnight stopover, while en route to his girlfriend and the beaches of Sydney. This distant goal—common to many horror films—is crucial. It emphasizes his displacement and fuels the dread when the escape keeps slipping away. We get a felt sense of his goal getting farther and farther away the harder he tries to leave.
This is what makes Wake in Fright far more compelling than something like the contemporary Deliverance (1972), which essentially scapegoats its horror onto local residents by painting them as toothless, mentally-challenged hillbilly rapists.
By contrast, Wake in Fright treats the Yabba with respect, and occasionally even reverence. The locals are just fine. They’re actually normal, at least within the boundaries of a ridiculously rough outback world with a 7:1 ratio of men to women.
Grant is the problem. He is the intruder.
And thereby the Outback, perhaps the most wide-open landscape on Earth, becomes claustrophobic. Psychologically. Grant’s entrapment comes from his choices—one step forward, two steps back. He gambles away his money. He gets housed. He insults people who genuinely try to help.
The Yabba does not imprison Grant. He imprisons himself.
Create a one-page outline of a horror story set in an expansive, beautiful, or open location.
This setting must not threatening on its own: no sheer cliffs, wild animals, or dark forests.
Rather, have the protagonist make one, then two, then three decisions–they can be stupid or self-destructive, but must be motivated–that turns the location into an inescapable nightmare.
Let the consequences be natural. This is not arbitrary punishment.
Trying to pinpoint precisely what makes Wake in Fright so unnerving is somewhat tricky because the film doesn’t rely on overt violence* or sadistic villains.
The real enemy is not embodied: it manifests primarily as a creeping dread seeping through the corners of each frame.
The Yabba is rendered in vivid, almost sensory detail. You can smell the sweat. See dust in the air.** You can hear buzzing flies. You feel dehydration, hangover. The atmosphere is oppressive, not because it’s spooky, but because it is hyperrealistic.
By contrast, Deliverance again fails here by reducing the settings to aesthetics: it is nothing but pretty wilderness. (A couple of rapids, maybe, but if you can steer clear of the toothless rapists you’ll be all good.)
Wake in Fright, however, presents a functioning society. Its residents are not monsters. They’re warm, generous, overwhelmingly friendly. In fact, aggressively so. They offer Grant everything: lodging, meals, companionship, and a substantial amount of beer. The friendliness somehow feels off. Intimidating.
Doc Tydon–Donald Pleasance in what may be the finest role of his long and storied career–stands at the center of this friendly menace. Tydon–disgraced big-city physician, unrepentant drunk, and sexual deviant–is charmingly luciferian. He offers Grant steak, booze, and philosophy. An outsider himself–as well as a shameless unlicensed physician, and he becomes a guide to the dark underbelly of the Yabba–and a reflection of what Grant might one day become if he fails to GTFO.
Importantly, however, Tydon is no villain in the normal sense. He doesn’t snarl, leer, or cackle. He repeatedly defends Grant after the latter’s gaffes. He gives Grant a place to stay. Hell, he picks the man up from the hospital. But he provides undeniably unflattering of what happens when a city boy stays too long in the Yabba.
Grant finds himself sinking slowly in the quicksand of the Yabba’s relentless dust and sun, its absence of anything to drink but alcohol, and–reflected by Tydon–its terrifying existential promise.
*Save the infamous kangaroo hunt scene, cause for much banning of the film. Before you get the wrong idea, the footage is harrowing but it was sourced from a government-sponsored kangaroo cull.
**No joke: director Ted Kotcheff actually had set people squirt dust into air before each shot.
Write a scene with a protagonist being offered help. With a smile.
Nothing is overtly threatening.
HOWEVER, by the end we need to feel an urgent need to escape. Achieve this with tone, subtext, and of course escalating, aggressive politeness.
Over the course of the film, Grant does not survive the Yabba. He becomes it.
This is not a tale of physical, Kafkaesque metamorphosis. However the more subtle psychological transformation Grant undergoes might in fact be more haunting.
Grant begins as a pompous, cultured schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse deep in the Outback (remember, the Yabba is where he had to lay over). He is too bored even to conceal his contempt for this work and its deep Outback surroundings.*
However, as the film continues, we watch Grant slowly but surely go native: he willingly engages in drinking, gambling, fighting, killing animals for fun. He loses himself, but never his contempt. Every time he (sobers up and) tries to right himself, it’s one step forward and two steps back.
Most queasy-making, Grant is not coerced.
No one locks the door on him. He simply goes along.
Because part of him wants to. Here we strike the core of the horror: the “monster” is internal.
This culminates in the (ahem) encounter between Grant and Tydon at the latter’s cabin the morning after the kangaroo hunt. Grant is not 100% unwilling here, but he is also ridiculously drunk and has been up all night so realistic consent seems questionable. It a metaphoric representation of the mildly nauseating half-in, half-out balance of opposites that Wake in Fright creates in the viewer.
In short, the horror is not that Grant is trapped here in the Yabba. It’s that he belongs here now.
*Part of a government scheme in the 60s whereby people could pay off their university debt by spending two years teaching at rural outposts.
Create a scene where your protagonist encounters someone who provides a dark reflection of her: the worst possible version of herself, or an image of what she might become if she is not careful.
The catch: this is a likeable, helpful person but with qualities that look hideous on paper. The protagonist–at least unconsciously–recognizes something in this person, however, and is compelled to get closer.
Have the scene end as the protagonist makes a choice that aligns her more closely with this dark reflection–particularly when we know she shouldn’t.
A horror film without a monster is disorienting simply by virtue of the fact that it has no physical embodiment: no scapegoat, no demon to banish. What we are left with is a setting, a feeling, and the creeping dread of watching the protagonist–by his own doing–start Living his Worst Life.
If ever there was a way to create existentially horrifying, soul-rotting horror, this is it.
Wake in Fright is an object lesson in just that.
The film provides excellent insight for screenwriters who want to go beyond slasher (or hillbilly) cliches and dive into the sort of terror we can’t escape.
Because it’s within us.
Further Viewing
If you’re interested in exploring more horror films without traditional monsters, consider:
These films each use the absence of monsters to create something more terrifying: a world where answers aren’t clean, and the enemy can’t be simply or tidily disposed of.
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