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SYDNEY - The man-eating saltwater crocodiles that roam the waterways of northern Australia are among the most fearsome creatures in a country brimming with lethal wildlife.
But tourism officials believe that a new film about a rogue "saltie" will boost visitor numbers to the area.
Rogue, written and directed by Greg McLean, received its premiere in Darwin, the Northern Territory capital, last weekend.
Australia's biggest-budget horror movie to date, it tells the story of a group of tourists terrorised by a saltwater crocodile.
Sylvia Wolf, president of Tourism Top End, predicted that the film would bring overseas visitors flocking to the Territory.
"Whenever we have a bad accident, or somebody gets taken by a croc, it seems that the interest goes up," she told the Sun-Herald, a Sydney tabloid.
While that may sound perverse, Mr McLean's previous film, Wolf Creek, released in 2005, suggests otherwise.
Wolf Creek, partly influenced by the Peter Falconio case, featured two British tourists tortured and murdered by an Outback predator after their car breaks down.
The number of backpackers who visited Australia the year after the film came out increased by nine per cent.
Rogue is the story of tourists who end up stranded on a tiny mud island after their boat is rammed from below and sinks during a river cruise in a secluded Outback region.
As night falls, the group - which includes an American travel writer, reporting on the Northern Territory tourism industry - realise that they are in the middle of saltwater crocodile habitat.
The tide starts to rise, and it slowly becomes clear that they are being stalked by a gigantic saltie.
Wolf Creek, Mr McLean's debut film, was made on a shoestring budget of $1.38m.
But it was so popular in the US that Rogue is being funded to the tune of $25m by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood executive producers.
It will be released first in the US, in October, before going on general release in Australia in November.
Its story, like that of Wolf Creek, is close enough to real life to titillate and thrill.
Newspapers in the Territory thrive on stories of encounters, sometimes fatal, between local residents and salties.
In 2002 a German tourist who went for a moonlight swim in a creek in Kakadu, one of Australia's most popular national parks, was attacked and killed.
About 70,000 salties, which grow to up 15ft long, wander the beaches and waterways of the "Top End", including - despite their name - freshwater areas.
In Kakadu, where they are one of the main tourist attractions, they can be seen sunning themselves on riverbanks, gliding through the water and lying semi-submerged in the shallows.
Bradley Murdoch was found guilty in 2005 of murdering Peter Falconio, a British backpacker, who was ambushed north of Alice Springs in 2001 with his girlfriend, Joanne Lees.
Mr Falconio's body has never been found, despite extensive searches.
- INDEPENDENT
