One of the most startling what-ifs in the story of Australia’s worst serial killer couple is that the only survivor of their crimes was in danger of being ignored by police. On 10 November 1986, when a 17-year-old girl arrived at a small suburban police station in Perth with a story of kidnapping and abuse at the hands of a local couple, sceptical officers passed her over to one of their most inexperienced staff members, who was also the only woman on duty.



Constable Laura Hancock was 22 and had never even taken a statement before, but she quickly established that the teenager’s story was too clearly and emphatically told to dismiss. She described getting a lift from the couple while walking home the night before; once in the car a knife was held to her, and she was imprisoned and chained in the couple’s home on Moorhouse Street. She had escaped in the morning by breaking through a window, facing off a vicious dog in her flight to help.

The details the young woman provided were wholly convincing, from the copy of Rocky left in the VCR after the couple had made her watch it with them, and the Dire Straits cassette left in the stereo, to sleeping pills she had refused to ingest and concealed under a mattress, and pictures she had drawn and left around the house to mark her presence. Though the couple had used pseudonyms in front of her, the teen had identified a real name on a medicine bottle: David Birnie. It raised red flags with the police.



Emma Booth and Stephen Curry as the murderous kidnappers in Hounds of Love. Photograph: Jean-Paul Horr

When, after hours of interrogation, David Birnie led police to a series of graves in Gleneagle national park, he and Catherine proved to have abducted, raped, and killed four young women in a five-week period in 1986. They were each sentenced to life in prison (David Birnie killed himself in 2005; Catherine Birnie remains incarcerated).



The Birnies’ infamous crimes have acquired an archetypal force in the landscape of Australian terror: the menace hiding behind the bland facades and baking concrete of endless suburban streets. It’s not surprising that they might eventually be used as inspiration by the nation’s film-makers. In the new Australian thriller Hounds of Love, a teenage girl is kidnapped and terrorised by a murderous couple in Perth in December 1987. A vicious dog features prominently in the film’s action, as do chains, a broken window and sleeping pills. Critics have been unable to avoid comparisons with the Birnies.

The film-makers, for their part, strongly resist the suggestion that Hounds is a true-crime story. Writer-director Ben Young has said that he drew on accounts of nine different murderous couples in developing the script, which explores the psychological dependencies that lead female killers to assist their partners in murder. Reports from early in the film’s production, however, suggest that the Birnies in particular were very much on the film-makers’ minds.

I looked up the Birnie house on a real-estate website and the layout of the house in Hounds of Love is almost identical Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

International audiences may not be familiar with the details of the Perth couple’s predations, but from an Australian perspective the similarities are clear. Australian film curator and scholar Alexandra Heller-Nicholas – who has written extensively on violence and rape in horror and exploitation cinema – says: “It’s incomprehensible to me to look at this as anything other than a true-crime movie: the details are too close, too similar. I even looked up the house that the Birnie murders took place in on one of those real-estate websites and the layout of the house in Hounds of Love is almost identical.”

The survivor of the Birnies’ crimes, Kate Moir – now a mother of three – is aware of the similarities, and has criticised the film-makers for drawing on her story, suggesting that Young ought to have used “his own imagination”. “I feel taken advantage of and confused,” she told the West Australian in July last year. “It is disappointing because I just want them [the Birnies] forgotten.”

Bogeyman … John Jarratt as Outback scourge Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek. Photograph: Best Fx/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Hounds of Love is only the latest in a series of Australian films that draw on gruesome true-crime stories, and not always without controversy. Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek made an international splash in 2005 with a horror story about three backpackers (including two Brits) who are hunted by a killer in the Australian outback. Posters claimed the movie was “based on true events”, and the plot has similarities with the crimes of the so-called backpacker murderer Ivan Milat, and those of West Australian truck driver Bradley John Murdoch.

Milat murdered seven people between 1989 and 1993, beating, stabbing, and shooting his victims and burying them in Belanglo state forest in New South Wales. Like the Birnies, he preyed on hitchhikers, especially foreign tourists – two British women, and three Germans among them. Milat was given a life sentence in 1996.

In 2001, Bradley John Murdoch flagged down the VW Kombi van of British couple Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees as they were driving along the Stuart Highway in Australia’s Northern Territory. He shot and killed Falconio, and assaulted and attempted to kidnap Lees, trussing her up and putting her in the back of his pick-up before she managed to escape. Murdoch was convicted and given a 28-year sentence in 2005.

Wolf Creek freely incorporates details from these crimes in the characterisation of its menacing outback killer Mick Taylor (played by John Jarratt), including Murdoch’s use of a cable tie to restrain his victim, and Milat’s severing of his victims’ spines. The film was temporarily banned in the Northern Territory in 2005 over concerns that its exhibition could prejudice Murdoch’s trial.

Suburban horror … the disused bank in Snowtown, South Australia, where police discovered eight bodies hidden in barrels. Photograph: AP

Justin Kurzel’s 2011 film Snowtown dramatises a series of murders that occurred around Adelaide in the 1990s. Eight bodies were found stored in barrels in a disused bank in Snowtown, a small community to the north of the city. A further four were discovered in an Adelaide backyard formerly occupied by John Bunting, an ex-abattoir worker and ringleader of the killers, who was convicted of 11 murders in 2003. A second accomplice, Robert Wagner, was found guilty of seven murders, and a third, James Vlassakis, pleaded guilty to four (a jury failed to reach a verdict in the murder trial of a fourth man, Mark Ray Haydon, who pleaded guilty to helping the killers dispose of bodies).

Before its release, there was an outcry from family members of the victims, who expressed concerns that Snowtown would be exploitative, or that it might generate empathy for the killers. Some relatives registered a complaint with the South Australian commissioner for victim’s rights, and a private screening was arranged in advance of the film’s premiere, but none chose to attend.

Though they range in focus from outright horror to grim psychological drama, these films all share a realist sensibility and an unflinching attitude to violence. They have also been boons to Australian cinema – bringing critical and commercial accolades to the industry, and launching the careers of their directors.

Mick Taylor is now an archetypal Australian bogeyman, and Wolf Creek is an ongoing franchise; McLean returned for a sequel in 2013, and is executive producer of a Wolf Creek TV series, which aired in the UK on Fox last year. His latest work includes horror film The Belko Experiment, and Jungle, a South American adventure starring Daniel Radcliffe.

Kurzel went on to direct Michael Fassbender in the $125m video-game adaptation Assassin’s Creed. Meanwhile positive notices for Hounds of Love at its Venice film festival premiere last year ended up securing US representation for director Ben Young and a deluge of scripts to consider. He is now working on sci-fi thriller Extinction, starring Michael Peña and Lizzy Caplan.

But questions continue about the wisdom – and ethics – of dramatising, or lifting elements from, real killings in service of a marketable film experience, especially when victims of these crimes are still in the community.

Megan is Missing … marketed as based on true events. Photograph: Trio films

Heller-Nicholas recalls the 2011 US found-footage horror film Megan is Missing, which told the story of two young teen girls who disappear after befriending an older boy online. Like Wolf Creek, the film presented a fictional story, but marketed itself as based on true events. Megan received an endorsement from Marc Klaas, the father of a 12-year-old girl who was kidnapped and killed in 1993, but not everyone appreciated the cautionary dimension of its violent content, and the film was banned in New Zealand.

“[Writer-Director Michael] Goi’s motive was unquestionably positive – he’s a good guy who really wanted to save kids’ lives – but that didn’t stop Megan is Missing from being dismissed as torture porn: ultimately, it still looks and feels like an exploitation film,” says Heller-Nichoas.

Hounds of Love director Ben Young has decried “gornography” movies, and his film exercises some restraint in its depiction of rape and assault, but it has still prompted questions, even from international critics. A New York Times review said that the film “never answers a basic question: Why are we watching this?”

Heller-Nicholas emphasises that Hounds shows Young to be a promising film-maker — “I thought the first two-thirds was just a rollicking, solid thriller,” she says — but has reservations about the film’s deviations from its real-life source, especially regarding the escape attempts initiated by the Kate Moir stand-in, a character named Vicki Maloney. “I physically shudder to imagine what Moir must feel to see her experience corrupted like this when she risked so much to save herself.”