The Sticks.
Colonial gothic horror feature.
Van Diemen’s Land, 1842. Elizabeth moves with her two daughters to a wild part of the colony, by the banks of the Styx River, to marry an ex-convict turned woodcutter. Her eldest daughter, Jenny, is ‘disturbed’, and gets more disturbed when they arrive in the thick forest- she can see ghosts in the trees.
But Jenny’s new step-father seems the more immediate threat, at least at first.
And then the forest starts to devour them.
‘The Sticks’Â has been developed through the RMIT screenwriting course, with John Reeves. In 2015, it was longlisted for the AWG ‘Think Inside the Box’ competition.