If you ever thought Australian horror peaked with guys in pig masks chasing tourists through the bush, Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil is here to politely (and spookily) tell you you’re wrong. Released in 1993 and forever remembered as the first feature film directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman, Bedevil is not just a ghost story—it’s three ghost stories, stitched together with equal parts memory, myth, and moments that make you wonder whether you’re watching a supernatural parable or the most stylish PSA about not building on swamps. Spoiler: it’s both.
Moffatt doesn’t care if you expect your horror neat. She hands you something closer to an art installation wrapped in an anthology horror format. It’s like Creepshow wandered into a gallery opening, put on its best clothes, and started talking about colonial trauma.
Story One: Mr. Chuck — Drowning and Movie Theaters, a Perfect Mix
The opener, Mr. Chuck, sets the tone: a boy haunted by an American GI who drowned in a swamp. Already, you know this isn’t going to be your usual popcorn jump-scare affair. Ghosts here don’t crawl out of TVs or drag you screaming into the night—they just… hang around. Like your uncle who won’t leave the barbecue.
The boy grows up in the shadow of white settlers who decide the best use of swamp land is, naturally, to build a cinema on it. Because what’s scarier than ghosts? Watching Crocodile Dundee II on a floor that’s literally haunted. The kid is left juggling siblings, abusive relatives, and an occasional drowned soldier ghost. Meanwhile, the story is narrated like a documentary by both the grown-up boy and a white woman reminiscing about her family’s part in colonization. It’s a Rashomon of regret, guilt, and bad construction choices.
What’s brilliant—and darkly funny—is how mundane everyone is about the haunting. Yes, there’s a ghost soldier, but also the cinema’s opening next week. Priorities, people.
Story Two: Choo Choo Choo Choo — When the Train Never Stops, and Neither Do the Ghosts
Next up is Choo Choo Choo Choo, which is either a horror story or the best band name ever. This one centers on Ruby, played by Moffatt herself, whose family lives next to phantom trains that never stop running. Some people hear ringing in their ears. Ruby gets locomotives.
The story is steeped in the outback—desolate, lonely, and the sort of place where you’re more likely to be killed by heat stroke than a serial killer. But then there’s the ghost of a little girl hit by a train, who keeps Ruby’s family on edge until they finally leave. Years later Ruby comes back, and surprise—the trains are still running. Because that’s how Australia works: the land never forgets, and neither do the phantoms.
It’s less about a literal haunting and more about trauma that repeats itself like bad karaoke. And it’s oddly funny to imagine that after all this, Ruby’s ghost problem isn’t exorcised by priests, psychics, or salt—it’s solved by moving house. Sometimes the only way to win is to give the haunting your forwarding address and hope it doesn’t follow.
Story Three: Lovin’ the Spin I’m In — Romance Is Dead, But It’s Still Dancing
The final tale, Lovin’ the Spin I’m In, is the closest thing to a gothic romance the film allows. Imelda, a Torres Strait Islander mother, follows her son Bebe and his forbidden love Minnie after they flee community disapproval. Tragically, they both die, but their ghosts don’t get the memo. Instead of floating toward the light, they hang around on top of a condemned warehouse, dancing endlessly like extras in a purgatorial music video.
It’s tragic, yes, but also weirdly delightful. Imagine passing by a crumbling building only to find two ghosts slow-dancing on the roof. Creepy? Sure. Romantic? Maybe. Practical? Not at all. Ghosts never think about the liability risks of condemned architecture.
This segment nails the idea of haunting as love that refuses to quit. It’s haunting as devotion, haunting as protest, haunting as a refusal to let society dictate who should be together. Also, it’s haunting as cardio, because those ghosts never stop moving.
Moffatt’s Style: Hyper-Real, Hyper-Strange
What makes Bedevil unforgettable is its style. Moffatt shoots Australia like no one else: colors pop unnaturally, sets feel artificial, and everything has the heightened strangeness of memory rather than reality. It’s not just ghosts who are surreal—the living are too. People stare, pose, and deliver lines like they’re part of a campfire story. Which, in a way, they are.
The past bleeds into the present, trauma becomes folklore, and the ghosts are never just “boo” apparitions. They’re metaphors with legs—or, in the case of the drowned GI, lungs full of swamp water.
It’s horror without the gore, but with a constant sense of unease. And yet there’s humor buried in that unease: the absurdity of settlers paving over swamps, the comic inevitability of phantom trains, the stubbornness of love that turns into rooftop choreography. Moffatt doesn’t just make you see ghosts—she makes you chuckle bitterly at the human mess that summoned them.
The Ghosts of Australia, Past and Present
What lingers about Bedevil isn’t the scares but the sense of a haunted country. Every story ties back to colonization, racism, and displacement, but instead of preaching, Moffatt wraps it in surreal imagery. The result is that you laugh, shiver, and think—sometimes all at once.
You can imagine mainstream horror audiences in 1993 walking out muttering, “Where were the chainsaws?” Meanwhile, anyone paying attention realized they’d just seen a groundbreaking Indigenous filmmaker turn the ghost story inside out and wear it like an unsettling carnival mask.
Performances: Haunted, and Occasionally Bewildered
The cast commits fully, even when the dialogue sounds less like conversation and more like oral history. Tracey Moffatt as Ruby feels like she wandered in from her own dream, which might actually be true. Julie Strain may have been the naked demon in The Unnamable II, but here it’s Mawuyul Yanthalawuy and Jack Charles who ground the absurdity with gravitas. They play it straight, because the ghosts are already doing the heavy lifting.
And then there are the extras, who often look like they’re one step away from asking where the catering table went. It works, though, because Bedevil isn’t about polished realism—it’s about that weird, jagged space between memory and nightmare.
Final Thoughts: BeDevil, Be Glad
Bedevil is the kind of movie that sneaks up on you. It’s not conventionally scary, but it is unsettling, hilarious in places, and deeply moving. It’s a landmark film not because of jump scares, but because it proves horror can be experimental, political, and still creepy as hell.
Tracey Moffatt gives us a trilogy of hauntings that aren’t about things that go bump in the night—they’re about things that never stop echoing, generation after generation. The ghosts in Bedevil don’t want to kill you. They want to remind you. And they’re not going anywhere.
