State Of Decay

Director Joseph Sims-Dennett leads us into the dark heart of Australia to unleash The Banished

- TARA BENNETT

THERE ARE CERTAIN LOCALES that inspire dread, and fiction. For filmmaker Joseph Sims-Dennett, it was the dense forests of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia that became the fertile ground upon which he based his latest horror film The Banished.

My last film was set in an apartment, so I wanted to do something more of an odyssey where there's a trek," Sims-Dennett tells Red Alert, explaining why he pursued a more remote backdrop in which to stage The Banished. "At the time, I was living in Sydney, and you could just drive an hour and 45 minutes and you're in the Blue Mountains, which is where we shot a lot of this. It's just endless bush to the horizon forever up there."

During one of his hikes, he came upon an abandoned iron ore mining settlement that was a bustling community 150 years ago. "And then they abandoned it," he says of the company who owned the mine. "Now it's all really eerie and quite spooky up there. It was just very sad seeing it decay, that beautiful, old Victorian town. So I was mapping that onto this story where the core theme and driver is guilt being a corrupting force."