.the princess portal.

Last night I watched Picnic at Hanging Rock. I had been trying to find a copy of this film for a while and was lucky enough to get the director’s cut! Picnic at Hanging Rock is an old Australian film based on a book about the mysterious dissapearance of three students from a boarding school and their teacher on St. Valentines Day 1900. It is not based on a true story, but is presented so it feels like it is.

What attracted me to the film was the setting, an elite girl’s college in the edwardian era. The girls all wear frilly white dresses with coloured sashes on their picnic, wash their faces in basins full of flowers, there is quite a lot of beautiful imagery in the film for fans of the victorian/edwardian periods. I love the pretty valentines Miranda gets, I want to make some this coming St. Valentines.

When the girls leave the picnic grounds to explore the rock the film begins to get rather eerie. Its strange really, because nothing happens that seems very scary, but the combination of the weird panpipe music and strange behaviour of the girls makes it rather creepy. It really is a very good mystery, I’m not going to say anymore so as not to spoil the storyline.

One thing that struck me as interesting was the character Sara, being an orphan in the school, when her guardian stops paying the fees the headmistress threatens to throw her out. Sara is an unusual child with a good imagination - this seems to be a paralell to A Little Princess.

If you like interesting old films and mysteries, I would reccomend Picnic at Hanging Rock. If you watch it at night I think it adds to the creepiness of it. Its not horror though, I don’t watch graphic or violent films, its just eerie, haunting and slightly hypnotic.