The True Horror Of Hounds Of Love Lies In The Story Of Its Real Serial Killer

Content Warning: the following article includes discussions of animal abuse and sexual assault.

The first scene of "Hounds of Love," a brutal 2016 horror film from director Ben Young, is shot from the POV of a skeevy couple, Evelyn and John White. We watch a group of Australian schoolgirls playing volleyball in slow motion, their skirts waving against their lean bodies jumping in the air. This camera technique shows how the Whites get voyeuristic pleasure in hunting for their next victim. They offer 17-year-old Vicky a ride, eventually luring her to their home and chaining her to a bed to enact sexual and violent torture for their own amusement. These cruel actions are an aphrodisiac for the couple, and when they're not harming Vicky they're having sex with each other.

Young does not show the full extent of what's happening, but just enough so that we can fill the horrors in our own minds. What makes Vicky's torment so upsetting is that she's only one small step from freedom and the outside world, but she keeps getting caught trying to escape. From the outside, the Whites' home looks like any other part of suburbia. This makes "Hounds of Love" seem like something that could happen anywhere, even right under our noses. Adding to this is its nearly identical resemblance to a case in Australian true crime history, the Morehouse Murders.

It's never explicitly stated that "Hounds of Love" is based on a true story, but it follows the real-life case of David and Catherine Birnie so closely that it's hard to believe the film didn't draw any inspiration from it. Within the span of five weeks in 1986, the couple kidnapped, raped, and murdered four women. Vicky's character mirrors Birnie's 15-year-old victim Susannah Candy, who also had a wealthy surgeon father. Vicky promises that he will pay a hefty ransom, but the Whites are only interested in inflicting harm. The Guardian reported that Australian film scholar and curator Alexandra Heller-Nicholas also found similarities to the Birnies in the set design:

"It's incomprehensible to me to look at this as anything other than a true-crime movie: the details are too close, too similar. I even looked up the house that the Birnie murders took place in on one of those real-estate websites and the layout of the house in 'Hounds of Love' is almost identical."

Much like the Birnies, the Whites force their victim to take sleeping pills and have a guard dog to block their potential escape. David and Catherine were both sentenced to life in prison, whereas the couple in "Hounds of Love" turns against each other, with Evelyn killing John and her fate left unknown as she wanders the streets holding the knife.

Despite these similarities, Ben Young told SciFiNow that he drew inspiration from nine killer couples, and preferred to tell a fiction story rather than a true crime one:

"I didn't really like the idea of giving specific serial killers more notoriety by throwing their name around. And I also like the freedom that I had by not having to stick to any particular story. Because real life doesn't work like movies. In movies, characters have to have arcs and I couldn't find anything like that in any of the true cases that I read about."

He also spoke of not wanting to depict his characters — even the captors — in a black-and-white way. You can see this in Young's sympathetic characterization of Evelyn; she's more of an unwilling accomplice who is being manipulated by her sadistic husband. John is the one who leads most of the cruelty, not only the vicious rapes of Vicky but also the devastating scene where he kicks a dog to death.

Young made valid points about his hesitancy to adapt the Birnies' story, but "Hounds of Love" would have been a stronger horror film if it held a clear perspective, either entirely original or his interpretation of their crimes.