The just-about-to-shoot Aussie horror flick Site Unseen takes a much-loved local discussion topic as its starting point: real estate.
“Site Unseen is a horror film with lashings of comedy, about a group of rural psychos who are targeting real estate agents,” writer and co-director Tristram Baumber tells FilmInk. “The killers’ plan is to scare off agents, so they won’t keep trying to sell off the land. The protagonist of the film, Kacie, comes up with a crazy plan to help the psychos in the hope that they’ll let her go…but things don’t go quite as she’d assumed.”
Whether it’s the alleged housing crisis apparently crippling Australia, the eye-watering prices of homes in our capital cities, or the number of properties being happily and easily snapped up by international interests, real estate is a perennial hot topic in Australia, and Site Unseen may very well tap into some very deep-seated local desires. After all, who doesn’t want to see the wholesale slaughter of real estate agents, right? “Real estate and property are such a huge topic right now,” says Baumber. “It feels like it’s all people talk about, and there’s a bigger case of ‘haves and have nots’ than I’ve ever seen before. I guess real estate agents are a bit of an easy target as soon as that topic comes up, so we thought it could be a strong selling point to make agents the victims. Someone recently said to us that it’s like we’re making a film with guilt-free deaths for the audience to enjoy. Personally, I think that’s going a bit far, but it shows we’ve hit on something!”
Site Unseen comes from an exciting collection of filmmakers. Co-writer and co-director Tristram Baumber makes his big screen debut after receiving much praise for his writing on television projects like The Other Guy, The PM’s Daughter and Mother And Son, and will team with fellow debutante, co-writer and co-director Allan Brady. Co-producing and starring is Zac Garred (Bring Him To Me, Occupation: Rainfall, Australian Gangster), who is currently working with Aussie legend Bruce Beresford on a documentary about famed boxer Les Darcy. “I play Parker, a cocky, smug and patronising real estate agent who thinks money can buy him out of anything…but not if the buyer ain’t buying!” Zac Garren tells FilmInk.
With everything set and ready to roll, Site Unseen will go before the cameras in about a month’s time, with the whole film shot in The Hunter Region of NSW, about two hours north of Sydney. “I’ve been living in the Hunter for thirteen years now, and Allan Brady has lived in the area most of his life,” Tristram Baumber explains. “We’ve always wanted to shoot something up this way, because there’s so much beauty and such great locations. We’ve got a great creative community up here in the Hunter too. So really it was just about finding the right project to do up this way.”
And that project very well may get audiences talking with its mix of horror and comedy, and its rich threads of social commentary and satire. “In the earliest versions of the idea, I think we leaned too heavily on the comedy aspects, and it deflated the horror aspects,” Tristram Baumber explains. “The key, we discovered, was to make it a real, genuinely frightening horror story, with scary antagonists and real threats to the characters. Once we made sure that was happening, you can find funny moments around that. And they become funnier, because you’re working against stuff that’s truly unsettling the audience.”
We’re ready to be unsettled…and we can’t wait to see some real estate agents get whacked too…
Stay tuned for more on Site Unseen.
