I watched more fingers fly through the air last night, A joke was even cracked by the knife-wielding psychopath. But the humor served only to heighten the anxiety of both the victim and the viewer rather than deflect attention away from any lost. Wolf Creek tells the story of anti-Crocodile Dundee, a serial killer in the Australian Outback who has a nasty habit of luring tourists into an abandoned mining camp. Like lower-budgeted horror films such as Open Water and Blair Witch Project, it begins by alluding to real events which supposedly inspired it and then uses a realistic style to sustain a certain amount of authenticity which left my gut churning and my mind racing with questions such as: Would I have known to smash the killer's head in after I shot him?

As is so often the case, I also asked myself why I continue to subject myself to such torture. After so many splatter flicks, my fascination should have waned, right? I then wondered if I should I go back and read articles on the masochistic pleasure of horror in the hope of curing myself. I may pull out some dusty textbooks, but I doubt that I'll remove all horror flicks from my Netflix queue. Alas. Instead, I'll alleviate some of my own residual anxiety by chatting a bit about what interested in the movie.

Horror fans, especially those from major metropolitan areas, know that rural America is very scary. If you walk through rows of cornfields in the Midwest, you will find little boys with biblical names and sharp scythes. Southern Georgia is populated by in-bred families who enjoy banjos and pretty mouths. You can easily find cannibals in desolate parts of Texas because meat is very good to eat. And don't get me started on Kentucky. What I hadn't really thought of until last night, however, was that rural horror might just be a global phenomona and not confined to the States. But thanks to Hostel and Wolf Creek, I now know that villages in Slovakia can be just as terrifying as the South and the Outback as creepy as Western Virgia.

Now I'm dying (please don't take me literally) to know what rural horror looks like in other parts of the world. What's scares the urbanite in Germany? France? How about Italy? What about Japan, Korea or Argentina? What common anxieties are played on? Are Hostel and Wolf Creek inspired by American horror or are they pulling from a tradition within their own countries?