Netflix's Apex Tops Global Charts as Part of Australia's Outback Film Legacy

It's one of the biggest streaming hits of the year so far.

Netflix original action thriller Apex is one of the most-watched movies on the steaming service.

Released in late April, it quickly racked up 2.54 billion minutes viewed and peaked at number one on Netflix's Global Top 10 English movies list, capturing fans obsessed with the Australian wild.

Starring Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron, Welsh star Taron Egerton who nails a "gnarly" Australian accent, and Australian star Eric Bana, Apex is about a grieving woman who seeks solace in the wilderness, only to become ensnared in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a serial killer.

When asked why he decided to set and shoot the film in Australia, director Baltasar Kormákur said the film was actually set in the United States in the script, but they needed a warm climate at a specific time of year.

Australia's outback is a backdrop that has found favour in both Hollywood and homegrown hits, with the bush and sometimes the wildlife being characters in themselves.

It's become a go-to setting for horror movies but other genres have also benefited from the world's anxious relationship with rural Australia.

Here's our list of top 10 movies set in Australia's creepy outback.

10. Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)

A film that opened many people's eyes about the Stolen Generations and the role that state governments had in taking children from their families.

Yet another warning that the most dangerous creatures in the outback might wear a uniform and act in the name of the law.

9. Road Games (1981)

Director Richard Franklin was an Alfred Hitchcock super fan and used Rear Window as the inspiration for this cross-country thriller set in a truck.

Two imported American stars, Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, encounter a serial killer on the long road across the continent.

It's a warning to be careful about who you run into on the Nullarbor.

8. Quigley Down Under (1990)

Magnum PI TV star Tom Selleck came to Australia to make a revisionist Western that revealed a harsh side of the outback.

The story saw local landowner Alan Rickman using a hired gunman to exterminate the local Indigenous population.

It pulls no punches and proves yet again that the most dangerous creatures in the outback are the humans.

7. Burke & Wills (1985)

An ambitious production shot by future Oscar-winner Russell Boyd with Jack Thompson as Robert O'Hara Burke and Nigel Havers as William John Wills, it told the most famous cautionary tale of colonial Australia.

Two ill-prepared explorers aim to cross the continent from south to north and back again, only to die of thirst on the way home in a Greek tragedy of mammoth proportions.

If they'd only taken the advice of the local Indigenous people, Burke and Wills might have made it home to become living legends — rather than dead ones.

6. Razorback (1984)

The movies love it when animals go rogue.

Sometimes it's a shark, or killer bees, or a bear, a crocodile, or piranhas. But in the Australian outback it's a wild pig, a razorback.

Best known for his music video clips, Russell Mulcahy's film is wildly over the top and often very funny, shot by another future Oscar-winner Dean Semler with music by Iva Davies.

It has all the ingredients of a classic genre film in the Ozploitation tradition.

5. Walkabout (1971)

Strangers in a strange land, two English children wander the outback in their school uniforms before being rescued by a local indigenous man played by David Gulpilil in his film debut.

Like other great films about Australia it was made by a foreign director, Nicolas Roeg, who had an eye for the details of what makes this country distinctive. They are things that local filmmakers might, perhaps, take for granted.

4. Evil Angels (1988)

Based on possibly the most famous legal case in Australian history, a family goes camping at Uluru only to have their daughter taken by a dingo.

A baby's cry in the dark that August night in 1980 has echoed down the decades and Fred Schepisi's film, fiercely in Lindy and Michael Chamberlain's favour, used members of TV's Comedy Company as a kind of Greek Chorus repeating the many wild, and untrue, rumours about the case.

3. Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975)

Not quite the outback but still a cautionary tale about going into the bush, only this time there's no wild pig or serial killer waiting. Just a mysterious rock.

One of the classics that revitalised the Australia film industry, superbly directed by Peter Weir with the greatest use of panpipes in the history of the movies, four schoolgirls in 1900 go on a picnic and don't return for their afternoon classes.

And not even an extra chapter of the original novel released decades later satisfactorily explained what happened.

2. Wolf Creek (2004)

Inspired in part by killers Ivan Milat and Bradley Murdoch, this film did more to scare potential tourists from Australia than just about any other.

Which is why it is so high on this list.

John Jarratt as Mick Taylor created a legendary character, but the film is torture porn of the worst kind. It seems to relish depicting the violence dished out to his victims, and the ending of the film leaves us in no doubt that a sequel was on the way. And about that film the less said the better.

1. Wake in Fright (1971)

Regarded by many as the greatest Australian film of all time, it tells the story of a teacher from the city working at an incredibly isolated outback school.

Staying overnight in a town very much like Broken Hill, he sees the chance to win enough at the local two-up school to buy his way out of his teaching contract and go home to his girlfriend in Sydney.

Needless to say, it doesn't work out that way and he is forced to confront his own demons as well as the locals who introduce him to the many terrors of the outback, including a notorious and horrific kangaroo shoot.

Wake in Fright was renamed Outback internationally.