Devils on Horses is the ANZAC cavalry soldiers and their equine colleagues in the Great War of 1914 to 1918. 150,000 horses were shipped across. 5 came back.
Director: Edward Sampson Producer: Terry Kingi. Doc Edge Film Festival 2025
An extraordinary story at many levels. 1914 was not supposed to fuel any Pan god consuming rage, as the great European and Commonwealth nations had become so economically intertwined.
But pandemonium and panic ruled. Capped off by a Spanish Flu pandemic.
Not even hindsight illuminates enough, especially why it flipped back again in 1939. A clue in the swastika symbol which is also the same ancient Sanskrit one.
Men who had fought and survived were all irreparably scarred on return. Many drank alcohol, the primary form of self-medication. New Zealand soldiers suffered the highest rates of suicide after the war.
Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was only formally recognised in 1980 in the DSM-III manual.
Kingi was also one of the abused young people who was in the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Care, and his testimony is on the public record. He suffered electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) as unanaesthetised punishment repeatedly. (As a doctor I have helped administer this in a therapeutic setting).
He started a program around 20 years ago, where PTSD damaged men (firemen, police officers, Māori youth institutionalised) could be started on a healing course by being paired with horses.
This was in the wild and alpine environment of the South Island. Men form bonds with the animals which is healing in and of itself.
The cavalrymen who fought in the Sinai-Palestinian theatre against the Ottoman Turks also formed a close bond with their equine comrades.
The men looked after their mounts and would often give them their last bit of water. The horses in turn would loyally trust their rider.
A large amount of research went into the project that began seven years ago. Many old diaries were pored over, like the diary that Kingi’s ancestor kept.
This project was started prior to the last pandemic of gain-of-function, and 2020 brought with it significant roadblocks.
The producers say they had NO outside funding and everything came from their own back pockets.
Working with the therapy horses, they painstakingly re-enacted scenes and sequences using actors, based on the archival material.
Horses are like Marlon Brando. They don’t take direction. They’re only slightly bigger than him in his later years.
The one scene they used with the PTSD patients was the re-enactment of soldiers (naked) and horses bathing in the Suez Canal. One of the most psychological and psychically satisfying.
And what of Horses and Men. One of the most tragic elements of war was the utter breakdown of the psyche.
Men were not allowed to recover in the battle grounds. There were field punishments one to four for people who were broken. Emotion could not be expressed.
The soldiers could cry and confess to what they dare not do around their colleagues, to their horse. In the quiet times when they could commune with their best mate.
As the campaign went on, the horses were continually graded as to their condition.
A and B were fight fit. C was struggling but of some use. Then there was D. They shoot horses, don’t they?
The producers great grandfather relates his story of how he came to execute his mount. And how he subsequently refused any further contact with horses on his return home.
We do see plenty of archival material. But it is the re-enactments which give Devils on Horses their chilling power and the fiercely beating warm heart.
Tickets available HERE.
Rev. Orange Peel
