It’s October So I Watched a Horror Movie I’d Never Seen Before: ‘Lake Mungo’

I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, but not as many as I’d like. As usual, I’m spending part of October filling in some of the gaps.

I had to pause Lake Mungo about five minutes after starting it because I started to wonder if I had seen it before. That, of course, would defeat the purpose of any installment of this annual series. So I checked my Letterboxd account and googled my name alongside the title and, nope, this would be a first-time watch. That didn’t make the feeling go away, at least at first. The 2008 Australian film, written and directed by Joel Anderson, takes the form of the sort of supernatural documentary that’s always playing somewhere on television, often in the upper reaches of the channel lineup. The foreboding ambient score, ominous B-roll footage, tightly cropped interviews, and slow unveiling of shadowy scraps of evidence of the spirit world all feel naggingly familiar. Even if you’ve never seen Lake Mungo, it can feel like you have.

Yet while Lake Mungo’s form is familiar, its content is not. The film begins as a fairly straightforward investigation into a family of three who may or may not be haunted by the ghost of a fourth member lost in a drowning accident. And though it continues in that vein to the end, Lake Mungo gradually reveals that it’s less concerned with whether the departed have found a way to stick around than those who have been left behind. It’s a film about hauntings, but not all of them are of the supernatural variety.