15 scariest summer horror movies of all-time
By Wesley Lara
2. Wake in Fright (1971)
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
It is very possible that if you don’t have Shudder and/or you’re not an Australian native, you may have never heard of this movie. For the longest time, not many people knew about it.
Wake in Fright, based off of a novel from the 1960s, was originally thought to have been a lost film with many missing parts of the film forcing distributors to release censored and low-quality versions of the film. However, the original copy was rescued in 2004 by the editor, Anthony Buckley, prompting the re-release of the Australian classic and reminding everyone just how brutal of a summer movie it truly is.
The story follows an English schoolteacher who wants to join up with his girlfriend, Robyn, for the summer holidays, so he stops as at a nearby town called The Yabba before his flight. There, he encounters the drunk and aggressive locals and after joining up with them for a beer and game, he begins to descend into immorality as he joins the locals in several unusual and barbaric practices. In short, this is a movie that is not for the faint of heart, but not for reasons you might expect.
Wake in Fright is loose in narrative structure, but succeeds in giving us complex characters as we follow them doing increasingly immoral things, all with the intense Australian heat accompanying this appropriately muggy film.
This is a summer movie that places you out to dry in the middle of the road, forcing you to watch the characters lose all sense of dignity as a night in an Australian town becomes a bizarre and brutal odyssey that ranks among one of the most thought-provoking and disturbing movies made in the 1970s. Far from a conventional summer flick, but a summer flick it is and a damn good one too.