Where to begin with Indigenous horror

The recent success of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and TV’s Reservation Dogs (2021 to 2023) has highlighted a growing appetite for Indigenous screen stories. But where Scorsese’s film confronted the brutality of white supremacy, it also struggled to shift its gaze away from settler perspectives. Likewise, while Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s TV series offers a refreshing comic take on ‘Rez’ life, it is still firmly rooted in the harsh realities of the contemporary First Nations experience. Dig a little deeper, however, and you will find a wealth of filmmakers pushing at the edges of genre cinema to reimagine Native lives and stories on Turtle Island (North America).

In confronting the complex range of issues facing contemporary First Nations communities, or reckoning with the equally knotty legacies of settler colonialism, one might expect viewers to need an intimate knowledge of settler histories and Indigenous politics. But the beauty of genre – especially horror – is its capacity to work on multiple levels. 

The late Mi’gmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby, who died in 2022 aged just 46, recognised this better than most, creating work that confronted the already post-apocalyptic existence of Native communities by using horror as a ‘gateway drug to better conversations’.

A true landmark in Native horror, Barnaby’s own rip-roaring zombie flick Blood Quantum (2019) was named for the eugenics-inspired concept that sought to stratify Native peoples according to the purity of their ‘Indian blood’. Riffing on Canada’s notorious Indian Act of 1876, which controlled just about every aspect of Native life, Blood Quantum is also steeped in post-Romero zombie lore, and audiences need not bone up on Canadian history, or have an intimate understanding of First Nations politics to appreciate Barnaby’s whip-smart, blood-splattered take on the zombie film.

In a classic reversal narrative, those with Native blood are immune from the zombie virus raging through a settler population desperate to take refuge on the reservation, a pocket of land once set aside for Native communities. The film is set on the fictional Red Crow Reservation, a thinly veiled stand-in for Barnaby’s childhood home of Listuguj, Quebec, thus expanding the world established in Barnaby’s debut feature, the slow-burn 1970s-set revenge drama Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), which offered a withering attack on a Residential School system designed to assimilate (and brutalise) Native children.

By setting Blood Quantum in 1981, Barnaby highlights a key moment in the history of Listuguj, with an opening gambit of zombie salmon offering a subtle nod to government efforts to restrict Mi’gmaq fishing rights in the same year. This struggle was immortalised in Alanis Obomsawin’s landmark documentary Incident at Restigouche (1984), a key influence on Barnaby, and one that exemplifies the importance of both mainstream genre cinema and pioneering Indigenous filmmaking in shaping contemporary Native horror.

Other recent work by First Nations filmmakers has built on this mix of influences to embrace the full range of the horror genre, from brooding, supernatural folktales, to taut sci-fi thrillers, and self-aware takes on alien invasion.

Centring on the Haida community of Canada’s northwest coast, Edge of the Knife (SG̲aawaay Ḵ’uuna, 2018) opens in quasi-anthropological style, but any realist impulse is cast aside when a member of the community inadvertently causes the death of his best friend’s son. Fleeing into the forest, his tormented descent into the wilderness soon spirals into insanity, as he is transformed into the ravenous supernatural entity known as Gaagiixiid (‘wild man’).

Where Blood Quantum sought a direct, on-screen engagement with the horrific legacies of colonialism, Edge of the Knife is untainted by the settler gaze, with intricate sound design and point-of-view camerawork helping to cement the film as a visceral Indigenous take on folk and body horror. A true community effort, marshalled by co-directors Gwaai Edenshaw (Haida) and Helen Haig-Brown (Tsilhqot’in), this tale of moral and social obligation might seem self-contained, but it also masks off-screen efforts to grapple with those same, horrific legacies, having developed via a project to reclaim a Haida language almost completely erased by colonialism.

Edge of the Knife was executive produced by Zacharius Kunuk, whose groundbreaking film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) kickstarted a long tradition of Inuit feature filmmaking. The latest example is Slash/Back (2022), the debut feature from Inuk creative Nyla Innuksuk. Dubbed ‘Attack the Block in the Arctic’, Slash/Back overturns the standard sci-fi alien invasion model that settler colonial scholars have identified as a tool for ‘indigenising the settler’. 

Instead, the film positions a team of young Inuk girls as staunch land-defenders who spend a (very) long summer’s day fighting off a Lovecraftian alien threatening to terrorise the remote Inuit community of Pangnirtung, just south of the Arctic circle. In doing so, the girls draw on both Native hunting skills, and knowledge of horror conventions, The film even includes a hat-tip to Jeff Barnaby, with one of the girls seen watching his short film, File Under Miscellaneous (2010).

More thriller than horror, Cree-Métis filmmaker Danis Goulet’s Night Raiders (2021) further demonstrates the capacity for genre cinema to work through complex questions of oppression and sovereignty in productive, engaging ways. Set in the aftermath of a future civil war, it centres on a young mother struggling to shelter her daughter from a government directive that all children must attend a mysterious institution called The Academy.

Alongside this clear nod to the Residential School system, Goulet drew specific influence from centuries of colonial policy, while finding cinematic inspiration in pioneering Native documentaries, social realist drama and the speculative fictions of science-fiction. While the latter’s influence is clear, the film’s climactic stand-off between Native rebels and neocolonial authorities owes its visual look to Obomsawin’s tense 1993 documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, which captures a similar confrontation between the Canadian army and Mohawk land protectors.

Indeed, the film’s debt to pioneering Indigenous filmmakers is evident in closing credit thank-yous to both Obomsawin and Māori filmmaker Merata Mita. In fact, Night Raiders is a Canadian-New Zealand co-production, featuring Māori/Samoan actor Alex Tarrant in a key role, and offering an interesting new direction for what Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay once dubbed ‘Fourth Cinema’.

Barclay coined the phrase at a time when self-representation was largely limited to the realm of documentaries and an emerging movement of Indigenous broadcasting. In mainstream cinema – and particularly in mainstream horror – Indigenous presence was largely limited to mystical tricksters or the ghostly hauntings of ‘Indian burial grounds’.

Despite a flourishing of Native horror filmmaking in Canada, where funding for Indigenous filmmaking is much more prevalent, little has changed south of the border. In the market-driven environment of the United States, the embrace of Native horror has been much more limited, with most US productions tending to be made by non-Native filmmakers.

Antlers (Scott Cooper, 2021), for example, draws heavily on Native folklore but with little care or attention for Native issues, historical or contemporary, despite the best efforts of legendary Oneida actor Graham Greene. As the latest entry in the Predator franchise, Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022) hints that a more sensitive treatment of Native stories is possible, especially when made in collaboration with First Nations creatives, such as the film’s producer Jhane Myers (Comanche/Blackfeet). At the same time, the filtering of a Native story through an existing franchise suggests that US horror still has some ways to go, while re-sparking questions about whether Native stories are best told with Native filmmakers at the helm.

Jeff Barnaby: The Art of Forgetfulness – featuring Blood Quantum and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, and a short film programme and discussion – plays as part of Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered (24 to 28 July 2024), followed by a UK tour of Blood Quantum.