‘Star Trek’ turns 55: a look at some of the famous actors you had no idea starred in it over the decades
To mark the 55th anniversary of the legendary series, we take a look at some of the shocking famous actors who've guest starred over the decades.
![It’s all set up in a documentary style, like something you would run across late-night on the ABC. This found-footage format saw it slotted into the run of post-Blair Witch horror movies of the late 2000s, like the 2007 franchise-starters Paranormal Activity and [Rec]. It’s easy to see why a savvy but under-resourced film-making team would go this route – it’s low cost to produce, there’s a clear commercial niche, and low-res video provides the perfect murky visual field to stage some spooky jump scares. But with one exception, Lake Mungo largely foregoes shocks in favour of a spine-tingling atmosphere of dread. The film-makers don’t rest on the format as a vehicle for cheap thrills – this is the rare low-budget spooker that convincingly doubles as a portrait of bereavement. When Alice’s spectre starts turning up in family photos and home videos, the Palmers turn to a local radio psychic to make sense of these ghostly apparitions. The film then self-reflexively becomes about the nebulous proofs of supernatural phenomena made possible through camera technology, and about the mindset of the audience that buys into them. But Anderson has yet more cards up his sleeve, and offers answers only to expose deeper questions. It’s clear he set out to deliver a real movie, with patient plotting, dramatic revelations, and defined character arcs. Even more remarkably, the cast and crew managed all this without a typical script – in pursuit of documentary authenticity, they shot with little rehearsal or blocking, working from detailed scene breakdowns, with Anderson eliciting dialogue by posing as the behind-camera interviewer. Eventually Lake Mungo winds its way to a climax at the titular archaeologically significant site in far-west NSW, and to one last revelation about Alice’s final days. Here the film delivers its big horror movie moment, and it is a doozy – eerily strange and blood-curdling enough to set off that wave of YouTube explainer vids and fan dissections. But what’s special about this scene is that it finally re-frames Alice’s fate not as a mystery to be broken open and picked apart, by the viewer or even by her loving family, but as something cosmically unfathomable, and terribly personal. Unlike so many of the dead-teen-girl narratives that litter contemporary media, Lake Mungo lets its absent heroine keep some secrets in her grave.](https://images-r2-1.thebrag.com/tb/uploads/2021/10/lake-mungo-halloween-feature-400x200.jpg)
