‘Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead’: Nick Cave’s most psychotic and harrowing movie cameo
Director John Hillcoat, known for projects such as The Road, Lawless, and The Proposition, made his 1989 feature debut with the gripping prison drama Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead, which contains a brief but unforgettable appearance by Nick Cave.
It’s a really amazing film, but one that is sadly little-known outside of Australia, and extreme Bad Seeds fanboys. Admittedly, I saw Ghosts… almost alone, at its sole midnight screening in NYC.
Perhaps it is a misconception, but due to the worldwide popularity of films like Chopper and the classic camp TV of the women-in-prison soap opera Prisoner: Cell Block H, I can be forgiven, I hope, for assuming that Australians, on the whole, are a bit obsessed with criminals, violent crime and incarceration. I guess it’s in their blood, so to speak. I kid, I kid, Aussie readers. Please don’t kill me.
Loosely based on the life and writing of Jack Henry Abbott – the psychotic murderer turned literary protégé of Norman Mailer turned psychotic murderer once again – and research done with David Hale, a former guard at an Illinois maximum security prison, Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead features a cast of real-life ex-convicts, former prison guards and tough-looking motherfuckers they found in local Melbourne gyms. This film is realistic. Scary realistic. HBO’s Oz is a day spa in comparison.
Narrated by a (fictional) former prison guard, Ghosts… takes place deep within the bowels of a maximum security prison somewhere in the Australian outback. The place is an incessantly humming, fluorescent-lit nightmare. Due to outbreaks of violence, there has been a three-year lockdown that is still ongoing. The tension is palpable. It’s a claustrophobic, concrete hell that no sunlight penetrates, a hatred and resentment-fuelled bomb with a very short fuse just waiting to go off.
As events transpire, the viewer begins to see that the prison authorities are actively trying to provoke the prison population, and that they are pitting the guards against the inmates, preying on both to escalate the violence in order to crack down on the prisoners ever harder and to justify building a fortress even more fearsome, inescapable and “secure”.
Ghosts… has layers of unexpected meaning. Although the script – co-written by Hillcoat, Cave, one-time Bad Seeds guitarist Hugo Race, Gene Conkie and producer Evan English – tells a reasonably straightforward tale of prisoners captive in a high security fortress where escape seems impossible, there’s a wider allegorical message about the power dynamic inherent in Western capitalism: conform, do exactly what you’re told, or face the consequences. Like this high-security hell on earth.
Nick Cave’s most disturbing acting role
Although contrary to how Ghosts… was marketed, Nick Cave is onscreen for just a short appearance about an hour into the film. But it’s a moment of pure genius. Cave plays Maynard, a violent psychotic who paints with his own blood. Maynard is an absolute lunatic, deliberately brought in by the prison authorities to make an already bad situation much worse. His ranting and raving pushes the tension into complete murderous chaos. Though only seen briefly, it’s Cave’s Maynard who lights the bomb’s ever-present fuse.
Cave’s cameo is like someone just wandered into frame from one of his Bad Seeds nightmares. Eyes darting, voice quivering with ecstatic, miserable and horrendous violence. Maynard isn’t just another psychotic in the line-up; he’s the embodiment of what the prison has become – a self-contained theatre of cruelty where sanity doesn’t just snap, it gets ritualistically sacrificed.
You get the sense that even the other inmates, already marinated in hopelessness, recognise him as something altogether darker. It’s not hyperbole to say that Cave’s few minutes onscreen land like a hammer blow, making you question whether the true architects of this hellhole are the guards, the system, or the devils that live inside men like Maynard.
Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead is extraordinary film, as as bleak and as uncompromising a work of art as I have ever experienced, it might be difficult for the squeamish to sit through. Once seen, it can never be forgotten.
