beDevil : a sixth draft script by Tracey Moffatt

Willoughby, NSW : Anthony Buckley Productions, [1992]. Film script. Foolscap folio, original metal brad; iv, 83 leaves, printed recto only; dog-eared corners, last leaf heavily creased, otherwise clean and complete.

beDevil is a 1993 horror film by Australian photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt. It was the first feature film written and directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman. The producer was Tony Buckley, known for The Night, the Prowler (1978). The film’s soundtrack was composed by Carl Vine.

The film is in the form of a trilogy of ghost stories that were inspired by stories Moffatt heard being told by her Aboriginal and Irish families when she was a child. It stars Lex Marinos, Tracey Moffatt, Riccardo Natoli, Dina Panozzo, Mawuyul Yanthalawuy, Les Foxcroft, Banula Marika, Auriel Andrew, Daphne Byers and Jack Charles.

beDevil was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, before its general release on 28 October 1993. It was a commercial failure, grossing just $27,300 in Australia, despite favourable reviews by some critics. Those critics included Virginia Fraser, to whom this copy of the final sixth draft was sent – presumably by either Moffatt or Buckley – to assist in the writing of her review, beDevilling, which was published (perhaps a little belatedly) in Metro Magazine, Issue No. 96, 31 January 1994. Fraser’s rapturous review opens:

‘Like its author, Tracey Moffatt’s first feature film, beDevil, is stylish, confident, daring, and original. A trilogy developed round ghost stories heard as a child in her family – “of drama queens”, she has said. beDevil can be read literally as three unconnected tales of the supernatural with more frisson than adrenalin, or as deeply resonating metaphors for the way national or objective history forms the lives and subjective experience of individuals. Together they depict a present invaded and bedevilled by the past….’

Decades on, it seems the film has well and truly shed its “box-office flop” tag. ACMI, for example, in describing beDevil for a contemporary audience, hails it as ‘an astounding work of Australian cinema which combines iconography drawn from Aboriginal culture and mythology, urban Australia, and popular culture.’ Critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Vulture, New York) opines that ‘Moffatt blends her striking, signature visual style – drenched in color and excess – with the intersecting cultural strands of the folklore she grew up with, in a film that deserves more recognition in both Australia and horror film history more broadly.’

According to the NFSA – the only Australian institution to hold any copies of Moffatt’s drafts for beDevil – the script went through six drafts. The first four of these bear the film’s original title, Haunted, and the NFSA dates its copies to October 1990, March 1991, May 1991, and August 1991; the fifth uses the revised title beDevil and is dated to November 1991; while the NFSA’s two copies of the sixth and final draft are given differing dates of 1991 and 1992 (although the latter is more likely to be correct).

Provenance: Estate of Virginia Fraser (1947-2021), feminist artist, writer, editor and curator.