Peter Weir’s classic comedy of the macabre – one of the most influential movies of the 70s Australian New Wave – returns in an immaculate, all-new 4K restoration co-presented by the National Film and Sound Archive.

“148 people live in the township of Paris, and every one of them is a murderer.” So went the tagline to master Australian filmmaker Weir’s 1974 cult classic, in which the oddball residents of an outback town – named after but distinct from the French capital – subsist by luring unsuspecting passers-by into grisly car crashes. When they’re not salvaging the wreckage for profit, the townsfolk are harvesting the body parts of accident survivors for medical experiments. But when one hapless outsider is invited into the community, he soon notices something is very, very amiss.

Shot in rural New South Wales, Weir’s demented feature debut – which the director promoted by driving a porcupine-spiked Volkswagen Beetle up and down the Cannes Croisette – received mixed reviews from local critics at the time of its release, but has since gained a reputation as a visionary original work. An unforgettable blend of black humour and surreal horror, Cars had a major influence on producer Roger Corman’s 1975 film Death Race 2000 and the original Mad Max (a debt George Miller acknowledged in the vehicle designs for Fury Road), while Weir would go on to make Picnic at Hanging Rock the following year; the rest is history.

“Nothing can top The Cars That Ate Paris for sheer weirdness … A complicated satire and a violent and eccentric classic.” – The Guardian

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Presented by the National Film and Sound Archive’s digital restoration program – NFSA Restores – reviving our cinema icons.