STACK #184 Feb 2020

EXTRAS

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sense where you feel like you’re watching a nightmare unfold in broad daylight, and it’s that stark sunlight as well.” Adding to the sense of unease is the film’s eerie central location – an abandoned tourist attraction on the outskirts of Canberra. “It was an amazing find,” says D’Aquino. “There was a gold mining town there that was rebuilt as a

TONY D’AQUINO

A graduate of the prestigious VCA School of Film and Television, Tony D’Aquino has only made one feature film to date, but he’s an instant local hero to horror fans for delivering a good old fashioned R-rated gorefest proudly made in Australia. D’Aquino’s ferocious debut, The Furies , can be described as a mix of The Hunger Games and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The story involves a group of women who are mysteriously abducted and forced to play a most dangerous game, in which they are hunted by masked maniacs. A self-described “huge horror nerd,” D’Aquino tells STACK the idea for the film stemmed from his desire to do a modern take on the slasher film cycle of the 1980s. “I love the slasher genre and that ‘final girl’ trope, where one woman survives to face off

against the masked killer. So I thought, what would happen if you had a whole bunch of final women and a whole bunch of killers and put them together – how would that play out? “That was the idea, and I also wanted to

update the slasher a bit, because it became a bit problematic later in the cycle, being misogynistic

and sexist. I wanted to change it up and make it all about the women, but not them waiting to be rescued or running around screaming with their tops falling off. “My main tonal inspiration is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , the 1974 version. I wanted that

tourist attraction, but it quickly went broke in the ‘70s, I believe, and they just walked

I wanted The Furies to be like a fun rollercoaster ride, going back to the VHS days...

away and left everything there. So it’s kind of been rotting since then and the

buildings have aged naturally; it looks like a real ghost town. The owner kindly let us rent the property and it basically became a studio backlot for us. It’s in the

middle of 60 acres of ghost gums, which are quite eerie, particularly for overseas audiences. It looks like a forest of bleached bones.” Essential to any homage to ‘80s slasher flicks is an abundance of gruesome make-up effects, and D’Aquino kept things practical, enlisting prosthetics designer Larry Van Duynhoven ( Upgrade ) to deliver the insanely gory set pieces. “He was happy that I was going to show all the effects and not cut away from them,” D’Aquino says. “I wanted The Furies to be like a fun rollercoaster ride, going back to the VHS days of getting a video, a bunch of friends and a pizza, and to scream and laugh and engage with the movie.” SH

The Furies is out on Feb 12

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