While walking to a party one night she too is offered a ride from the White’s, who offer to sell her some weed back at their place. Vicki’s parents are divorcing and she’s not taking it very well. Soon we met another girl, Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings). The White’s will need another victim soon. Before long, the girl is chained up in a seedy bedroom in the White’s house, eventually murdered and buried. From the distance Young keeps from the scene we can sense that catching a ride from these two is bad business. After the practice breaks up, John and Evelyn follow one of the teenage girls and offer her a lift. The girls are being watched by a man and a woman sitting in their beat-up car - John White (Stephen Curry) and his wife Evelyn (Emma Booth). Using slow-motion, Young & cinematographer Michael McDermott put is in the mindset of a voyeur, fetishizing every single curve of a leg or swell of a breast.
Set during a blazing Australian Christmas in the 1980s, Hounds of Love opens with leering, lecherous close-ups of high school cheerleaders practicing their routine. A film like The Hounds of Love should almost be unwatchable based on subject matter alone, yet there’s a distinct, tarnished beauty at work here, a sure-sign that Young has a keen eye for the genre. Writer-director Young, in his feature debut, has tapped into something raw and remarkable here. It lingers with you engulfs you like a freezing wind. It’s not something you shed like a coat as you step into a warmer location. And then there are the films like Ben Young’s Hounds of Love. The horror on display here isn’t for thrill seekers.
This analogy is apt for slasher pictures and ghost stories, where the horror elements can be laughed off once we exit the darkness into the sunlight. There is, of course, an exhilarating thrill in being briefly scared and then walk away unscathed - after all, that’s why people like roller coasters. Why do we enjoy horror movies? Being drawn to comedy or romance makes sense - who doesn’t want to laugh and fall in love? But horror is a baser genre - more visceral, more primal.