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Editor’s Note: In each Wild Women with Steak Knives entry, author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas explores women directors in the horror genre, highlighting films that are largely overlooked or forgotten. Read them all here!
Catherine Millar is a stalwart Australian TV director, beginning a career in the early 1980s that has since seen her work on some of that country’s most popular television series. Across her myriad made-for-television movies, Millar’s work has revealed a particular flair for horror/thriller material, as seen in the stalker films Every Move She Makes and Without Warning, the horror-comedy Mumbo Jumbo, and in 1998, the Sydney-set haunted house movie 13 Gantry Row.
13 Gantry Row stars Australian TV darling Rebecca Gibney, who had already worked with Millar on the popular ’80s television series The Flying Doctors and would reunite with her years later on the long-running family drama Packed to the Rafters. 13 Gantry Row was relatively against type for Gibney, as not only was it a horror film but it was also a decidedly horny one for a TV movie, a notable deviation from her otherwise comparatively wholesome star persona at the time.
The film follows upwardly mobile couple Julie (Gibney) and Peter (John Adam), who have found the house of their dreams at a surprising rock-bottom price, a huge terrace house with harbor views in the much sought-after Sydney harbourside suburb of The Rocks.
They discover that the last owner was a reclusive elderly woman who left the house largely untouched and undeveloped. Undertaking their renovations, the bewildered young couple discovers a large wall covered with cast iron plates, which they promptly remove. But doing so unleashes something evil, and a large creeping stain on the wall grows in seeming relation to Peter’s increasingly disturbing behavior…
As a made-for-television horror movie, 13 Gantry Row doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but in its defense, it doesn’t seem to have any interest in doing so; rather, Millar instead seems much more focused on making a fun yet fairly color-by-numbers popcorn movie.
Yet, watching the film today in the context of the very real nightmare of the Australian property market, where home ownership is largely out of the reach of young couples like Julie and Peter unless they have substantial family money behind them, the film is in its own way oddly quite terrifying. $300,000 for a double-story seaside home on the banks of the harbor? Somehow today, ghosts and haunted mold stains seem much more believable!
For more made-for-TV horror, check out Diana Prince’s list of five great made-for-TV horror movies,and explore more women directors in the genre with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas right here! If you’re in the mood for more Australian horror, we’ve got you covered with 15 top-rated Australian horror movies.
