Heavenly Creatures (1994), the film that launched Peter Jackson's international career, was based on a true story. On 22 June 1954, two teenage girls, Pauline Parker and her friend Juliet Hulme, lured Pauline's mother, Honorah Parker (also known as Rieper), on a walk down a secluded pathway in Victoria Park, on the hills of Banks Peninsula near Christchurch, where they bludgeoned her to death by striking her repeatedly on the head with a brick enclosed in a stocking. This horrific matricide, compounded by lurid reports of a lesbian relationship between the girls, left the nation in a state of deep shock. New Zealand at this time prided itself on being ‘God's Own Country,’ a godly society imbued with a laudable Christian morality that had been rewarded by peace, material prosperity, and a conviction of its ethical superiority to the rest of the world. It was a time when the ‘best’ qualities of England were believed to have been imported into the British Empire's most recent colony, where they had produced an impeccable respectability – not to mention a genteel sense of class divisions that had taken deepest root in Christchurch, the most Anglican settlement in the country. This was a period when audiences in the cinemas still stood to attention for a clip of Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by ‘God Save the Queen,’ before the screening of every film, and parents in households still referred to Great Britain as ‘home,’ even if they were third-generation New Zealanders and had never been to the Old Country.

The reason why the Parker/Hulme murder delivered such a shock to the national psyche was because it blew the lid off New Zealand society's idealized view of itself. Instead of a genteel paradise of moral probity and genteel respectability, what it exposed was the enormous gap between outward appearances and the actual reality they concealed. Decorum in mid- twentieth-century New Zealand dictated that those things should never be talked about: homosexuality, marital infidelity, and a depth of puritan repression that was producing dysfunctional relationships and a range of psychological disorders – even to the extent of breaking out into explosions of homicidal violence when the emotional pressures it generated became too unbearable.