Why The Legend Of Mick Taylor Can Grow, But The Mad Dog Of 'Wolf Creek' Never Will

On one hand, you probably shouldn't feel too bad for Greg McLean. After all, the Australian filmmaker is on quite the roll at the moment, establishing himself firmly within the international genre scene thanks to his work behind the camera on The Darkness and The Belko Experiment. And his most recent feature film Jungle, a true-life tale about a young Israeli backpacker (played by Daniel Radcliffe) stranded for weeks in the remote Amazon wilderness, has earned the director some glowing notices.

On the other hand, maybe spare a thought for Greg McLean. Because he has one of Australia's most iconic big-screen monsters taking up a fair bit of real estate in his mind.

McLean first introduced us to Mick Taylor, an all-Australian pig and roo shooter with a knack for terrible jokes, a rather xenophobic and bigoted view of the world and a seemingly insatiable bloodlust that can only be sated by murdering people (usually backpackers, but he's not choosy), in his harrowing 2005 cult classic Wolf Creek.

Inspired by outback human-hunters like Ivan Milat and Bradley Murdoch and brought to terrifying life by John Jarratt's portrayal, Mick quickly achieved icon status among horror fans and bogeyman status among regular moviegoers. It was scary enough that he had no qualms about picking off any poor unfortunate who crossed his path, but something even more unsettling was how recognisable Mick appeared - how his partly laconic, partly knockabout demeanour barely concealed a loathing for anyone who wasn't white, straight, male or 100% true-blue Aussie.

Wolf Creek was a worldwide hit, critically and commercially, but it would be nearly a decade before Mick reared his ugly, Akubra-sporting head once again for Wolf Creek 2, once again directed by McLean. Around this time, however, Mick started to become more and more prominent. Prequel novels were written and published. McLean penned a couple of screenplays for a third Wolf Creek movie. And most distressingly, last year Mick Taylor made his way into people's homes via a six-episode Wolf Creek television series that aired on local streaming service Stan.

The series pitted Jarratt's Mick against young American tourist Eve Thorogood, played by Lucy Fry, who travelled the Aussie highways on a rampage of revenge after Mick murdered her family and left her for dead with a bullet in the back. Along the way, viewers learned a thing or two about our national nightmare - that his father was violent and abusive - and that Mick was responsible for the death of his own sister.

It also looked for a minute there that Mick may have been done in, but there's no keeping a good killer down, is there? And so we have a new six-episode season of Wolf Creek, premiering December 15 and airing in its entirety on Stan.

It's not 'Mick versus Eve, Round Two' in this new season, McLean and Jarratt pointed out during a joint interview prior to the show's return. "We all love Lucy," says McLean. "And Lucy was angling for a way to return while we filming the last series, so it was sad we had to break the news to her that her story was done and her character was off living a happy life... Well, hopefully."

"Lucy can now go off and be the next Cate Blanchett," chuckles Jarratt.

Instead, the set-up for the new season, described by McLean as "a Hitchcock-style survival thriller", is a busload of tourists from around the world ambushed by Mick and left stranded in the isolated outback, where they're easy prey for a nut with a high-powered hunting rifle. As ever, the stark beauty of the Australian environment provides an amazing backdrop for a tense, white-knuckle thriller, and for McLean it's a scenario that had its origins in the very first incarnation of what would eventually become the first Wolf Creek film. 

"Eight years before I made the first movie, I was developing a storyline about a group of international tourists in the Australian outback who ran afoul of this crazy villain, and it developed over the years but it became too big for a first film, so I took a couple of elements of it - the villain and two of the characters - and it became Wolf Creek," he says.

And having the opportunity to repurpose that storyline into a longer narrative for the TV series enabled McLean to work it into part of the ongoing Mick Taylor legend.

"The new season does set up a bigger storyline, so if we were to go again there are a lot of things we could set in motion," he says.

"Having said that, there are only a certain number of stories you can tell before you're draining the well. To me, there are four or five more stories you can tell because you're getting into areas you don't really want to mine."

"When you start repeating yourself, that's when you stop," adds Jarratt.

"That's the essence of it - making sure what you're saying or doing is genuinely, entirely different and an authentic addition to your canon," says McLean. "Audiences ultimately want to be surprised and entertained and challenged, and I think this series is really bold in that way."

There are changes and departures in that regard, but something that remains constant is Mick himself.

"Mick doesn't change at all," Jarratt admits with a laugh. "He's a very shallow character. He's a killer who has fun and plays games. What has happened through the movies and the series is that we've learned a bit about his background. But he hasn't really evolved along the way."

"The character of Mick is so fascinating - people are compelled to see this guy they love to hate," adds McLean. "We don't want to be beating a dead horse but he is such an evil man that there is a lot of different directions we can take that character without him getting too boring. We try to probe [him] and understand him but there's really no way to do that because he's not like anyone else."

"I don't understand him, mate," grins Jarratt. "I just justify him."

Wolf Creek premieres on 15 December on Stan.