Snowtown may seem like a fairly unassuming name for North American audiences, but in the movie’s native Australia, it instantly fills audiences with dread. It’s the name of a small, impoverished town in which a series of 12 brutal murders occurred in the ’90s, events recounted in THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS (a.k.a. SNOWTOWN), which opens this Friday, March 2 in New York and LA and has a free FANGORIA screening in Manhattan this Wednesday, February 29 (see details here).

Local tabloids instantly grabbed onto the Snowtown case, highlighting the sensational nature of the crimes and the fact that the bodies were buried in barrels full of acid. However, in the ensuing years, it was revealed on a much smaller scale that the crimes were rooted in poverty and abuse. John Bunting lead a group of people to commit the killings, posing as a father figure for disenfranchised youths like Jamie Vlassakis and initially seeming like a morally righteous character, punishing pedophiles whom the law had ignored before gradually shifting his focus to anyone his bigoted mind distrusted.

It was a fascinating and frightening story that seemed inevitably destined to be a film. For years, lurid slasher-lite screenplays made the rounds in the Australian film industry, and Michael Craft’s 2009 Aussie indie STORAGE was loosely based on the case, before first-time director Justin Kurzel stumbled into the mix and envisioned a more personal, challenging and thoughtful approach for the material. FANGORIA spoke with Kurzel following the film’s North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he dissected his uniquely disturbing cinematic take on the infamous murders.

The film proved to be a surprisingly personal project for Kurzel, who had grown up in Snowtown and vividly remembered when the crimes came to light. “It was quite an underprivileged area when I was living there, and very tough,” he recalls. “There was a high unemployment rate, and it had been in a low socioeconomic bracket for quite a while. I was living in Sydney when the murders happened, and was seriously shocked by how brutal and depraved they were. In the media, it was projected a little bit as a freak show, and I didn’t think much of it beyond the shock factor.”

Kurzel was pursuing a film career at the time, but never considered the crimes as fodder for a movie until a screenplay passed through his hands that illuminated aspects he hadn’t heard before. “When I read the script, I really had no idea about the fact that there were four killers—which is highly unusual with serial killers, who usually work alone,” he says. “I also had no idea about the state of the community and the level of sexual abuse going on that John walked into and kind of exploited. That, to me, was really fascinating in terms of this kind of father/son relationship between John and this disenfranchised 18-year-old kid Jamie, who kind of found his voice and identity through this serial murderer.”

This information had never been made public during the initial reports of the crimes, and instantly made the subject matter seem right for a feature in Kurzel’s eyes. “Jamie had turned against the guys and became a crown witness,” the filmmaker says. “He spoke a lot about John’s influence and the life he was living before John came into the family, which was pretty horrific. It was only four or five years after the murders that that information became a little bit more public. When I say public, it wasn’t presented in the newspapers. This was through books and the transcripts. It was a story not many people knew—certainly not me.”

This new side of the story proved so intriguing that Kurzel instantly latched onto the project, and he and co-scripter Shaun Grant began revising it with a greater emphasis Jamie’s inadvertent journey into darkness. “It’s interesting, because the very first screenplay I read was closer to a genre film,” Kurzel notes. “It had police in it, and the point of view was all over the place. We started rewriting completely from Jamie’s point of view, and went back to the books [Debi Marshall’s KILLING FOR PLEASURE and Andrew McGarry’s THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS] and the transcripts and looked at the events from his perspective. It sticks pretty closely to what actually happened, and that was very important to us.”

Latching onto Jamie as a protagonist also dramatically changed the film’s visual approach, as he became addicted to drugs in the later years of the crimes and had a difficult time remembering exactly what occurred. As a result, Kurzel decided to shoot that section of the movie in a dreamy, detached style, mimicking the young man’s fragile grasp of reality at the time. “Jamie was heavily dosed up on heroin in those days,” Kurzel explains, “and in the court transcripts he talked about not being able to remember a lot of things and it being like a dream and a kind of purgatory. He was constantly imagining things that didn’t actually happen. I found that state and that tone of internal voice to be so interesting. After the initial murders, I always wanted the film to become more impressionistic and start to speak a little more to Jamie’s internal world and his descent into a sort of hell. I guess it’s about him meeting this killer inside him toward the end.”

This stylistic device gives the film a haunting, nightmarish quality that’s tonally appropriate for the material, while also offering audiences a highly unconventional spin on the type of serial-killer story they’ve seen many time before. It was an ingenious stroke, and part of Kurzel’s conscious desire to separate his horrifying film from genre conventions as much as possible. “To be honest, I could never see how this story could fit within the conventions of what’s expected from a normal horror film,” Kurzel admits. “Audiences have reference points for the violence within horror movies because of certain genre expectations. I was interested in not giving viewers that compass, and really immersing them in an intimate way with this brutality that I felt needed to be very real and shocking.

“To me, what was so horrific about this story and the level of depravity was that the brutality came out of normal life,” he continues. “Some of these murders happened over two days as people ate. There was a school in the backyard of the house where many of the killings took place. Those kinds of details were so interesting to me, presenting people who exhibit an extraordinary level of brutality that lives so comfortably next to a normal domestic life. It’s very different from how violence is usually presented in horror films, which is normally quite heightened and even operatic. This story was the opposite of all that.”

There’s a remarkable scene in SNOWTOWN MURDERS that perfectly embodies this directorial philosophy, in which Jamie (played by Lucas Pittaway) wanders away from a vicious murder onto his front porch, where it’s the middle of the day and children are playing outside. While the killing itself is shocking, the contrast with the serene environment surrounding the crime is even more disturbing, and vividly expresses how atrocities like this can emerge from the most unexpected places.

With the Snowtown murders being so notorious in Australia, Kurzel knew he would have to approach the material delicately. He surprisingly chose to shoot in the actual town where the crimes took place and involved the community as much as possible, even filling many major roles with locals who had never acted before. “There was a lot of trepidation about the film—not just in the community but in the wider public of Australia,” the director reveals. “There were concerns that it was going to be gratuitous and there would be a lot of high-profile actors. So once we went down there during preproduction, we made ourselves very visible in the town to help alleviate concerns. I think people started to trust that hopefully the movie would be respectful, and they thought it was interesting that we were casting people from the area. The attitude changed quite a bit then, and people became very open to us, sharing their memories and impressions of that time. We’d meet people who had just gotten out of prison with John, or who had, back in the day, gotten John to babysit their kids. That was kind of odd and quite interesting to see that his presence was still felt there.”

In a difficult film filled with challenges, one of the biggest hurdles came in casting the role of sadistic John Bunting. While Kurzel was open to casting locals whenever possible, he know this was one role that required someone with more experience. He eventually chose Daniel Henshall, a little-known actor who delivers a remarkable performance. “When you do a film about a serial killer, the first thing you’re absolutely petrified about is the clichéd screen type with a twitch and a dress,” the director jokes. “When we hired Dan, he initially was like, ‘What do I read about serial killers? There are so many things.’ I said, ‘I don’t want you to go down that road; that’s not what he’s about.’ What’s fascinating about this case is how this guy comes in and seduces a family and community to believe in him in a very social way.

“So instead of having Daniel research other serial killers,” Kurzel continues, “I brought him down early before we started filming to develop relationships with all the non-actors. To me, that was the key. He should be able to walk into a room and have people gravitate toward him. It’s funny, because I deliberately cast an unknown actor and didn’t realize he had done a daytime soap in Australia. When he first arrived, everyone was coming up and asking for autographs. I was a little miffed at first, but it ended up being really cool because it kind of mirrored the dynamic I wanted between him and the rest of the cast. It was effortless. Everyone was naturally drawn to him.”

Indeed, Henshall is terrifying in the movie in a very unexpected way. His Bunting is a charming man who is not only capable of extraordinary violence and dispassion, but able to bring others along down his dark path. Kurzel’s film itself is an equally unconventional take on a well-worn staple, presenting a serial-killer story devoid of clichés and heightened drama. SNOWTOWN deglamorizes murder and presents it in such disturbingly realistic manner that even movies like HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER seem glossily stylized by comparison. It’s a remarkable debut that should establish Kurzel as a filmmaker to watch, and please North American genre fans with its fascinatingly original and deglamorized approach to the material.

The film has already become be a success with Australian audiences, for whom the subject matter was painfully close to home. As a result of Kurzel’s sensitive and thoughtful direction, that proved not to be a concern. “I believe people were finally ready to talk about it again, and see a fresh perspective on a story that had been drummed up by the media as a freak show,” he says. “Thankfully, everyone seemed to be intrigued to see a different point of view out there 10 years later.”

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