One of Australia’s great cult classics now restored in gorgeous 4K, Lake Mungo is at once a supremely spooky mockumentary, tragic family drama and atmospheric ghost story. After disappearing from a family picnic, the body of 16-year-old Alice Palmer is recovered at Lake Mungo, near the town of Ararat. As Alice’s story is told through a series of investigative interviews with family and friends, so too is the story of her hauntings as she begins appearing in the backgrounds of photos. Who really was Alice Palmer? Are these hauntings real? And what really happened that afternoon?

Regarded by some as the scariest movie ever made, Joel Anderson’s low-budget debut feature, which was released in 2008 to little fanfare, has amassed a well deserved reputation as one of the best Australian horrors. Convincingly utilising the documentary form to frame its posthumous puzzle, Lake Mungo shines in the sad malaise it conjures out of its realistic cast of interviewees, eerie score and stunningly shot ambient scenery. It’s also one of the great horror films to go digital, utilising heavy grain and the ambiguity of pixels in ways as potent as Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse.