A still from The Moogai by Jon Bell, an official selection of the Midnight program at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Jon Bell On Learning to Fight the Real Monsters in The Moogai

Jon Bell’s debut feature The Moogai tells the story of a young Aboriginal couple who have just brought home their second child, but what should be one of the happiest times in their lives turns to terror when Sarah (Shari Sebbens) starts seeing a malevolent spirit she believes is trying to take her baby. Her husband Fergus (Meyne Wyatt) desperately wants to believe her, but as she becomes more unstable, he is increasingly concerned for the safety of their children. Is Sarah really being visited by a child-stealing spirit or is she the biggest threat to their family’s safety? The Moogai explores post-natal depression, transgenerational trauma and Australia’s stolen generation.

Nadine Whitney speaks to writer/director Jon Bell about crafting his Indigenous horror story.


Nadine and Jon lived on Bundjalung territory (Northern Rivers NSW to Southern Queensland) growing up. Jon explains how country impacted upon both the short film of the same name and the feature.

Jon Bell: It’s a Bundjalung story. It’s a universal story, but the Moogai itself, That’s a Bundjalung word. Other Aboriginal language groups probably use the same word, but it means different things. There’s a lot of Bundjalung identity invested in in the short and the feature.

Can you tell me a little bit about where you were filming for the feature? Because it didn’t seem set on the same land.

JB: The feature so mostly in Sydney, the bushland behind the service station is sort of northwest of Sydney. And then not quite up to Wisemans Ferry, but in that direction on the Hawkesbury. And then when Sarah’s lost in the bush and her mother Ruth (Tessa Rose) comes along that was all filmed around Penrith, Western Sydney.

The climax and the prologue were both filmed in the same area, which is Peak Hill, which is my father’s area, Wiradjuri country, out on the other on sort of south of Dubbo. And then the cave itself is in Wellington, which is also south of Dubbo, but a little bit closer to Sydney.

Do you find that as a First Nations creative that you find it difficult to get specific histories across, not only to Colonial Australia, but also speaking across different Nation’s traditions?

JB: Good question. I mean, certainly with the specificities of experience you do want to find a way to speak with authenticity. The history that informs the film has generalised aspects to it as well. Almost all Aboriginal communities and families would have had probably some interaction with at some point in their history with the government or authorities separating families and severing cultural ties.

In terms of the prologue, we were hitting certain common denominators that help people to understand who haven’t had that experience. To help them recognise certain things like government men showing up in black suits and a government car. And the matriarch of the family pointing out they turn up because the men are away. Those kinds of things are common experiences all around Australia, but also in New Zealand, the United States, and Canada. Children being stolen from their families have been being experienced by a numerous native peoples.

I also wanted to make the film specific enough that it has certain details that I’ve been told by people and that I’ve read about through other documents; and that might have come down to me through the way that my own parents and grandparents have parented. I think helps it feel real. But I believe the film speaks a specific language and a general language.

There are many aspects of the film which will be understood by different parts of the audience where there is a universality of experience. For example, the maternal horror aspect where Sarah can’t get a male doctor to listen to her. The medical community is writing her off entirely as delusional. Did you do research into maternal mental and physical health?

JB: I didn’t necessarily do a lot of research. I was mostly raised by a single mother and watched a lot of the stuff that she went through. We had many long and lengthy conversations about her experience and perspective. And then also my wife and my daughters. Pregnancy and maternal health can be quite difficult. There’s a whole bunch of things that men don’t understand about the reality of being a woman.

One of the facts that hit me, and then I’ve kind of operated from this, was that men don’t understand what it’s like to walk around with 50% of the population being bigger and stronger than you. And that kind of threw a whole bunch of things into sharp contrast for me, and I wrote a little bit from that point of view of you know, because I’m sort of six foot and like over 100 kilos, and I feel pretty confident in my physical stature to be able to handle most things that men can handle, including other men. It was a process of getting out of my head and getting into the mindset of a character who is prey instead of predator. That unlocked a bunch of things for me around how I related Sarah’s point of view.,

The way that the Moogai itself is almost practicing animal husbandry on people. It’s taking babies from the ‘nest’ and that’s why the chicken embryos and the snakes are used as symbols. When we take eggs from a chicken, does a chicken know that we’re what we’re doing and that we’re going to eat the eggs? How does it feel about that? None of us know because we never bothered to ask the chicken. It is same with the Moogai and Sarah.  

Then there is Fergus and his relationship to what Sarah is going through. He is kind of all at sea because he’s trying to be supportive, but he doesn’t have the whole picture. He’s operating with a lack of knowledge – he’s sort of trying to care for Sarah and his kids in the dark. I also had conversations about what men simply don’t know.

One of the scenes I found extremely impactful is when Sarah goes to pick up her young daughter Chloe (Jahdeana Mary) from the Catholic primary school. She’s telling Becky (Bella Heathcote) how Catholic school was great for her and how well she did living with her adoptive religious white parents. And within moments due to suspicion on behalf of a young teacher, she’s gone from being a high-flying corporate lawyer to being considered a possible alcoholic and child abuser. It’s fascinating that as much as Sarah feels that she is accepted in white Australian culture, it only takes a slight trigger for her to be shown, “No, you’re not one of us.” Can you tell me a bit about writing that scene?

JB: It was always about the way that the wider system. In terms of the school, in terms of the hospital, in terms of the police, all of them have a what they perceive as a valid reason for acting the way they do. If they were challenged on it, the school teacher can say, “Well, I smelled alcohol and then she dropped the baby.” The hospital can say that she’s been unwilling to cooperate. And the police can say that there’s been a report put out that they’ve (Sarah and Fergus) escaped from a mental health facility. So, they all have these reasons that are valid within ‘the law’., But all those interactions are about the system furthering its own survival, and the system catering to its own ends. The system, in many ways, is an organism in and of itself.

The system operates on the basis of class more than race, but it manifests as race. If a certain section of the social strata was taken out, the system would still need to persecute somebody. If the welfare class was taken out, then it’d be the working class who would be targeted. Remove the working class and the target becomes the middle class. So, it is a class warfare, but the way that society views it in many ways, it becomes racial,

That’s reflected in how Ruth acts after Sarah has given birth to baby Jacob. She tells the doctor that both Sarah and Fergus have jobs because she’s afraid he will remove Jacob from their care if they can’t prove that they are financially secure. Ruth is reacting out of fear because at some point she must have lost Sarah in a similar environment when she was taken from her and given to a white couple for adoption.

I found the relationship between Ruth and Sarah fascinating. Sarah is operating without any knowledge of her own Indigenous heritage and making assumptions about why Ruth was declared unfit to raise. But it becomes very clear how quickly the same thing could happen to Sarah herself. How did you go about writing their dynamic?

JB: Part of that is the arrogance-slash-innocence of youth. Sarah has been spared all the trauma that her mother’s gone through. Ruth not only lost her sister, but you know, even though we never saw the Moogai take her, she’s lost her child as well. She carries these scars. That’s why she’s got those facial scars. She carries all this stuff with her, and you can see it. It’s one of the reasons I had Sarah getting the scars from same Moogai at the end too. It’s almost like ritual scarification, in that once she’s undergone some of what Ruth experienced, she understands.

You see Ruth with the scars, and then you see Sarah with the scars. And the question is will Chloe have to go through that? Hopefully not. Chloe has been part of three generations of female empowerment for them to be able to defeat the Moogai together. Ruth has passed the knowledge on of how to connect to culture, and that’s the thing that will enable them to defeat a supernatural and almost unstoppable force.  

The journey that mother and daughter go through together we’re all sort of there. But for the grace of God go I. There are so many tragic stories where somebody was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they were the wrong skin colour, or they were the wrong whatever, and some tragedy has befallen them that didn’t befall the next person that came along.

Sarah is too young to know that she’s had all the advantages of it in life that her station has given her, and she hasn’t really had to fight that hard for anything. Every time she’s fought, which is mostly in the courtroom, she has won. She’s a brilliant litigator. So, she wins those things, and she wins them relatively straightforward. But fighting against the Moogai, she needs to learn other things, and she needs to learn humility before she can be taught other things.

Nadine Whitney

Nadine Whitney holds qualifications in cinema, literature, cultural studies, education and design. When not writing about film, art or books, she can be found napping and missing her cat.

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