Lake Mungo

We dive into 2008’s Lake Mungo, an Australian found-footage/mockumentary that surprised us with how authentic and well-acted it feels, more like a traditional documentary than a jump-scare horror film.

We walk through the central tragedy of 16-year-old Alice’s drowning, the family’s grief, and the subtle escalation of eerie evidence—dreams, noises, strange photos, and hallway camera footage—before unpacking the film’s major twists.

We talk about how the movie plays more as a drama about mourning and uncertainty than a straight ghost story, why some turns feel contrived, and why the final montage retroactively makes the whole experience linger.

We also touch on the ongoing appeal of true-crime and mock-doc horror and what makes this one worth watching.

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Automatic Transcript

Lake Mungo (1996)

Episode 505, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: This week was my turn to choose, and I went into just my list of things that I was curious about that is, uh, post-2000, ’cause I thought you’d might appreciate a more recent film. And this is 2008’s Lake Mungo, which I had heard about, never seen before, but it comes up every now and then.

People talk about it when they talk about creepy, unsettling movies that really bothered them or, or hit them hard. And they talked about twists in it and maybe an ending that was a little unsettling or ups- upsetting. So it had always been on my list for that reason. I believe this has been requested at least once over the years.

Craig: I think so too.

Todd: Yeah, I didn’t go back to check our request list. I mean, it would be, it would’ve been years ago. Our, our request list, some of the things on there- It’s long … have been on there for a while. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty long. So whoever requested it’s gonna be very happy that we’re doing Lake Mungo today.

This is the first time I had ever seen it. How about you, Craig? You said you’d seen it before.

Craig: Yeah, I had seen it, like, gosh, you know, 2008, right? That’s when it came out, I think. Seems like a long time ago, but I remember reading about it. I don’t know. I feel like people were talking about it for a little while.

I didn’t see it until later than that, and I just happened to come across it on some streamer. I recognized the title, and it sounded intriguing based on the description. It’s a found footage kind of mockumentary, I guess-

Todd: Yeah …

Craig: you would say. And it sounded intriguing. So yeah, I had already seen it, and I was surprised that you picked it.

It’s not your typical choice, but I think it’s a good one.

Todd: Yeah. You’re right. This is… Usually I’m going for older stuff. We’ve got such a… I feel like we have an obligation to hit just these o- old ancient movies that there are just so many, but every now and then I surprise you.

Craig: Yeah.

Todd: This one, uh, I was surprised by this movie because I didn’t know anything else about it, and I went in to look it up and found out that the writer-director, this was basically his first feature film And he really hasn’t done much since or before this.

He did some shorts and, uh, he was in the script and continuity department for Late Night With the Devil. That’s about it. So I was actually kinda shocked. This is an Australian movie, and the first thing that struck me, I don’t know, about 10 minutes into this is just how incredibly well-acted it is. It is really well-acted.

We’ve done other movies like this before. Well, we’ve done other found footage movies, and we’ve done some documentary, mockumentary-type films. The one I was thinking of the most was that UFO one.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

Todd: Remember what it’s called? What was that called? There were two versions of it.

Craig: I don’t know. I feel like maybe it was Lake something or-

Todd: It was, um…

It was one where it had been done, like, in the ’80s, and it had been shot just on a shoestring by a bunch of… By a theater troupe, basically, and they didn’t really get much play or distribution for it. And it, it would’ve just sort of been lost to history except somehow the pre-release copies, I think the VHS copies that were sent to rental stores to try to get people to rent them, somehow they got copied over and copied over and got into the hands of some UFO people and distributed as though it was real.

And, uh, that became such a mythological thing that the original producer came out and said, “No, and you know, this isn’t real. I made it.” And because of the popularity of it, they were encouraged to remake it-

Craig: Mm-hmm …

Todd: in the early ’90s. And we watched that remake, and we ended up going ahead and watching… I think we independently were just so intrigued by it, we ended up going and watching the original, and we found the original so much better just because it had that air of authenticity that the remake didn’t.

It was because of the acting ability of the people in the… Well, I, I, I shouldn’t say acting ability. A- acting experience. It seemed like the acting experience of the people in the remake went against the authenticity of the film. It just felt more like people acting.

Craig: Yeah, I remember.

Todd: And especially for the new one, they had inserted little bits of interview, like they were interviewing people about the footage, and especially the interviews came across as really, really fake.

And it, you know, as an actor and a guy who’s… You know, for me, like, I do these, like, dumb mobile game ads, and they take a lot of different forms, and one of the forms that they’ve had me do a lot is that I’m the boss of some game company, and they’re interviewing me. Like, it’s like a clip from an interview showing me talking about our philosophy behind the game design.

And I often find that the hardest, to act like I’m just sitting there genuinely answering questions off the cuff from somebody even though I’m actually reading a script. Hmm. It’s so hard to come across as natural in that way. So I sympathized with and wasn’t even surprised that even the more seasoned actors when they came in and they were doing this interview style stuff, they just came across as fake.

It’s, it’s, it’s trickier than you’d think to act natural in that scenario. And this is all interviews.

Clip: Mm-hmm.

Todd: Everybody here is interviewed, and the actors are really, like, they didn’t do much after this. They didn’t do much before this. The director deliberately chose people who are very low-key and, and low-profile.

And God, they’re convincing. Don’t you th- Did you not think so?

Craig: No, I did. I just didn’t really think about it very much because I, I feel like I’ve seen this type of mockumentary before. I, I, I think I saw something recently. I couldn’t remember it, so I was trying to look it up while you were talking, but I think it was called Strange Harvest: Soul Murder in the In- Inland Empire- Whoa.

which is a whole mockumentary. Uh, it’s from 2024.

Todd: That’s a mouthful. Yeah. But I’ve heard of Strange Harvest. Yeah, uh-huh.

Craig: Yeah. I didn’t know that I realized that it had a subtitle. I think I just found it under Strange Harvest. But it was much like this. Aside from fantastic things happening that seem out of the realm of possibility, it, it seemed, like, real.

Like, you could accidentally stumble upon it on television or whatever and, you know, think that it was real, and that’s kind of how I felt about this one too. So I guess that speaks to their authenticity, like, it feels real.

Todd: Hmm.

Craig: I, I think that I’m also just currently… I’ve been watching a lot of documentary, well, I guess documentaries and also, like, documentary series lately, like spooky creepy ones.

Mm-hmm. And so I’m just kind of immersed in that format-

Todd: Wow … …