Jon Bell grew up on the horror films of the 1980s. While he said they gave him nightmares when he was a kid, he also grew to love them. It was the unstoppable killers in films like Friday the 13th, Alien and The Shining that inspired the Bundjalung and Wiradjuri man's first feature length film The Moogai.
"I had an uncle who used to show me all these hugely phenomenally scary films when I was like eight, like Evil Dead and the Nightmare on Elm Street," Bell told AAP. "I loved them, so I was trying to find a way to bring together questions that Aboriginal people have as a people, with my love of genre - sci-fi, horror." The Moogai follows Sarah and Fergus, a young Aboriginal couple as they are terrorised by a child-stealing spirit after the birth of their second baby.
Moogai is a Bundjalung word for spirit, monster, akin to the boogeyman, Bell said. The horror tale of the child-stealing spirit also serves to tell another story - one of the Stolen Generations, institutionalised racism, and intergenerational trauma. "Past trauma can, like a cancer metastasise and become almost like a tumour for the next generation," Bell said.
"How one parents is based on one's own childhood, the way we might have been parented was a reflection of the fear of being stolen. "For stolen mob and for the Aboriginal community, the film itself represents a way to look at the trauma without being too triggering, hopefully." Wongutha-Yamatji actor Meyne Wyatt said it is this story, underneath the surfac.