Adrian Deveau
Adrian Deveau is a settler Acadian writer, artist, and PhD student in Art History at Concordia University and holds an MA in Art History and Theory from the University of British Columbia. Adrian has worked with arts-based organizations including Thinking Through the Museum: Museum Queeries, the Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), Vancouver Biennale, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, and Reelout Film Festival. In their research, Adrian is interested in the intersection of queer art and political protest, Artist-Run Centre Culture, and the methodology of Telepathy within the archive.
Let There Be Blood:
Abjection and Colonial Subjectivation in the Rise of Indigenous Horror Film
Decolonization necessarily involves an interruption of the settler colonial nation-state, and of settler relations to land. Decolonization must mean attending to ghosts, and arresting widespread denial of the violence done to them. Decolonization is a recognition that a “ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice”
(Gordon, 1997, p. 64, emphasis on original)
Eve Tuck and C. Ree, A Glossary of Haunting, 647.
Red Crow Indian Reservation, 1981. A fisherman, knife in hand, stands beside a mountain-lined river and guts a fish on a wooden table. The man tears out the animal’s guts with his bare hands and throws the intestines into a bucket. Placed beside the table is a gore-filled container holding stale guts from his earlier hunts. While the man guts his second fish, the dead animal starts to writhe on the table after being torn open from head to tail. In harmonious necromancy, the fisherman is surrounded by the already-gutted fish coming back to life.[1] This is the onset of the zombie apocalypse. The scene, rendered in a grey dystopic colour story, is a snapshot of the 2019 zombie-horror film Blood Quantum. Directed by the late Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby (1976-2022), the film depicts the Mi’kmaq community of Red Crow during a global zombie outbreak that has consumed the land now-called Canada. Seemingly, the members of the community are immune to the zombie disease which has ravaged settler populations, infecting only the white European peoples of North America. Set against the hyper-industrial aesthetic of a junkyard, Blood Quantum inverts the traditional horror stereotypes of the zombie film to challenge the parasitic ideology of European supremacy onto Indigenous communities. Barnaby’s film inverts the apocalypse narrative onto white settlers through widespread deadly disease, a historical force inflicted upon Indigenous peoples by settler colonizers after contact.
Blood Quantum is one of many films of the past decade to challenge the horrors of colonization through the reworked genre. In “The Rise of Indigenous Horror: How a Fiction Genre is Confronting a Monstrous Reality,” Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliot showcases examples of the emerging genre in literature including Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) and Billy-Rae Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms (2018). Elliott traces the monstrous reality of colonial violence through her examples, arguing that “Indigenous writers… acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes you, weaving the reality of Indigenous life with fiction to scare audiences.”[2] From the Algonquin story of the Wendigo to novels including Garth Stein’s Raven Steals the Moon (2010), the Arctic horror anthology Taaqtumi (2019), and Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021), horror is continually embedded into the medium of Indigenous storytelling. However, despite Elliot’s reference to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum as an example of Mi’kmaq horror, the Indigenous horror film is widely absent in horror scholarship and cinema studies.
Utilizing community-based knowledge alongside feminist theories of abjection, this paper demonstrates how Indigenous horror, while challenging the category of the traditional “slasher film,” sets precedent for a new movement within the genre – that the reality of racism and colonization is the most horrific villain.[3] I will analyze three films, Four Faces of the Moon (2016), The Nightingale (2018), and Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2013), and their reflections on the monstrous apparatus’ of colonization. By investigating the films’ challenges to colonial legislature through oral histories and film production, Indigenous horror asserts visual sovereignty over the historical abject by reclaiming the violent act of colonial expansion from the colonizer and placing agency into the hands of creatives and their cameras.
The New Blood: Horror Genres Across the ‘80s
Before exploring Indigenous horror film, I will return to the bloody campground of the 1980’s slasher. Ranging from the summer camp massacre franchise Friday the 13th (1980) to the TERF-coded Sleepaway Camp (1983), the 1980’s slasher film is riddled with problematic tropes including the sexually explicit blonde femme, the muscle-bound rich white conservative male, and the corrupted queer youth-turned-mass murderer. The 80’s horror movie is stereotypical in its death sequences and phallic vengeance. The slasher trope emerged with brute force at the onset of right-wing reactionary politics in 1980’s America. The 80’s horror film symbolized the mass-hysteria around immigration, feminism, and HIV/AIDS in visual form, revealing to the audience their deepest fears of marginalized groups seeking vengeance on dominant culture. With United-States President Ronald Reagan’s policies of the reification of the neo-bourgeois through tax breaks and the hyper-valorization of wall-street’s economic claim to capital, as well as mass-racism and homophobia through the neglect of the AIDS crisis and police corruption, the 80’s horror film fed into the desires of the “post-American Dream” run-wild.
Horror film scholarship only began taking the conservativism of the slasher genre seriously with the seminal publication of Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992) and Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993), where both authors deconstruct the patriarchal violence embedded in the 80’s horror film. In “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Linda Williams argues that horror utilizes “body horror” to garnish visceral reactions from audiences, tethering semiotic constructions of voyeurism to the body of the performer. Utilizing renewed sentiment on the value of horror film after the ground-breaking work of feminist horror scholars, post-2010 horror is now redefining the monstrous categories of the “Other” by consciously reflecting the abject onto mainstream audiences through films including Get Out directed by Jordan Peele (2017) and David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2015). However, horror is and has always been political. Attending to literature, Scholars have argued that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) reflects alienation embedded in class systems and social abjection in 19th-Century Britain. Similarly, the work of H. P. Lovecraft is now read in a much sinister light, where scholars uncovered that the worldbuilding of Cthulhu was inspired by Lovecraft’s rampant fear of interracial mixing. Lovecraft’s monsters represent his idea of mixed-race children, an undeniable product of social Darwinism. So-called conventional horror, like the slasher film or Lovecraftian literature, is an inherently political genre despite its allegiance to conservative regimes of power. If the horror genre is the realm of social critique, then the political landscape is the grainy filter through which horror is viewed.
The movement of socially conscious horror film can be traced back to films like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), a film I explore in my section on Rhymes for Young Ghouls, which inverts the trope of the zombie by situating the Black protagonist against hordes of violent white monsters. The 1970s sparked a return to the awareness of class consciousness and social justice embedded in the horror films, where landmark productions like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Carrie (1976) highlight the deep-seeded injustices against women and the working class in America. Through inverting the monstrous in bourgeois society, the new reflexive horror genre emerging at the end of the 2010’s provides voices for racialized peoples, queer folk, and the working-class. Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum is no exception to the revitalization of social commentary through the horror film.
A note on theory: Since its conception as an academic discourse, the language of the horror film has been the language of psychoanalysis. While the psychoanalytic discourse allows for a reflexive commentary about the unconscious desires of society, the pathologizing lens of psychoanalysis leaves little room for the liberation of the female or “othered” body as a catalyst for male violence through the matrixial complex in Freudian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has also been the violent tool of colonizers who labeled Indigenous and Two-Spirit peoples across North America as “devious” and “uncivilized” in medical journals. However, I argue that the rise of the Indigenous horror film creates a new language in the horror genre through psychoanalysis, oral storytelling, and connection to community. By synthesizing the dialectics of psychoanalytic deconstruction with Indigenous storytelling and visual sovereignty, the Indigenous horror genre emerges to challenge the lineage of horror as a white man’s slaughterhouse. Through a critical lens of Julia Kristeva’s reworking of Lacanian psychoanalysis in her seminal books Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection and Passions of Our Time with case examples from contemporary Indigenous horror film, I will now demonstrate how both the Indigenous horror genre and a reworked usage of Lacanian psychanalysis can desublimate settler violence from the hands of the colonizer. My aim is two-fold: to salvage psychoanalysis from its confines as a pathologizing tool while shaping an Indigenous horror genre which sheds light on the monstrous figure crouching in the shadows of the dark room, colonialism’s polished jaded knife.
Four Faces of the Moon (2016)
At the forefront of the Indigenous horror genre is Amanda Strong’s stop-motion animation film Four Faces of the Moon (2014). Amanda Strong is a Michif artist and filmmaker based in Vancouver, BC, and founder of Spotted Fawn Productions.[4] Strong’s stop-motion work blends Metis storytelling with narratives of colonialism, visualizing the dichotomy of genocide and survivance in the format of a short film. Strong’s 2014 film Four Faces of the Moon, funded by Canada Council for the Arts and CBC Docs, is a key example of the Indigenous horror genre.[5] The short film opens with an acknowledgement by “Spotted Fawn” (Amanda Strong) dedicating the story to their grandmother. In the white text set against a black background, Strong also writes in their acknowledgement that “It is [also] for those ancestors who walked before me, people who carried Indigenous language and ceremony, people who held the buffalo in a place of reverence… before they were systematically destroyed and removed from their land.”[6]
The film’s opening sequence, underscored by violins and beating drums, jump-cuts between a flying spear and a running deer. The deer falls, tripping over a mountain of buffalo skulls piled high on a dark prairie field. The dominant narrative of the film follows a photographer tracing their family’s history of forced Christianisation through the residential school system across Canada. Strong’s character displays photographs of their family during ceremony interspersed with voice-overs of family stories spoken through the Michif language. Laced between the oral stories are scenes of violence, including British soldiers opening fire on Cree peoples, hunting rallies on trains moving through the prairies to slaughter buffalo, and soldiers setting fire to the habitats of the plain’s animals. A moon looms over the mis-en-scene of the film, providing an eerie blue glow to the aesthetic composition. In the moon’s uncanny lighting, the protagonist travels into the past and encounters a hoard of buffalo ghosts illuminated by the blue glow of the moon. The film ends by returning to the still-running deer. The moon, entering its final phase of illumination, catches the glinting blade of the twirling spear as it arches downwards towards the deer. Screen fades to black. Before the credits roll, Strong inserts text describing the slaughter of the buffalo as well as a written account by Maria Campbell on the impact of colonial violence. Campbell confesses that “Like me the land had changed, my people were gone, and if I was to know peace, I would have to search within myself.”[7]
Strong’s film is a testimony to the ongoing hauntology of colonial violence and genocide in visual form. Metis culture is rife with ghost stories, from the trickster figure Nanabush to the transformational spirit Kookoush. However, Strong highlights settler colonialism as the most vicious monster. From the mountains of buffalo skulls often found in colonial photography to the shots of abandoned residential schools, the abject is given full form through manifest destiny. In Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the psychoanalyst describes “abject” as the expulsion of toxins from the psyche, often embodied as a corpse, vomit, a ghost, or blood.[8] In a Freudian framework, Kristeva suggests that the abject is a by-product of the psychic separation between the I and the Other, a signifier of the “unclean” attributes of social subjectivation.[9] Moving towards a socio-political reading of the abject, horror has mobilized the abject to represent the social othering perpetrated by political suppression, colonization, and the patriarchy.
However, in her most recent book Passions of Our Times, Kristeva complicates her reading of abject from an I/Other dichotomy to an affective transference between the Ego, the Flesh, and the World. Kristeva originally notes that the abject must pass through the Ego before it is labelled as vile, and in the ego lies a system of language variants which produce the social conditions of acceptability and ideology. Expanding on her initial reading of the abject, Kristeva writes that language (a series of signifiers which label a subject as “abject”) passes through three realms of being – the Ego (the realm of the conscious psyche and cultural memory), the Flesh (the realm of the body), and the World (the realm of the “real”).[10] Through the passage of language into the Ego, linguistic signifiers – producing visual signifiers – create a rhizomatic structure of affect and cultural memory. Affect and cultural memory swirl in the realm of the Flesh, or the body of the subject, producing identity categories through subjectivation.[11] Subjectivation moves into the world, symbolizing a double bind of fascination and horror typical in the sign of the abject. Kristeva hopes to reread the abject for a deeper understanding of psychic forces, who is threatened by the abject and why are expulsions signified as a deviant return of the suppressed. The expansion of abject into the complex diagrammatic structure is integral to the understanding of the expansion of the new horror film, moving away from the scare-tactics of the abject or grotesque monster to the discursive structures of invisible violence which produce abjection-as-subjectivation.
Although Kristeva’s theory of the Ego/Flesh/World symbology is a complicated framework, the subjectification process is prominent throughout Strong’s short film. Four Faces of the Moon is adamant at distancing the horrific from the abject buffalo through on-screen text and oral histories. Foremost, the buffalo are vantage points into the violent histories of genocide across the prairies, specifically against Cree peoples. In the article “Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth-Century North America,” Tasha Hubbard argues that genocide can be extended to the slaughter of the buffalo. Drawing from Indigenous epistemologies, Hubbard notes the importance of plains buffalo as both a resource for food and for teaching. For many Metis communities, buffalo are an integral resource for food and clothing and are acquired through the lineage of buffalo hunts. Hubbard cites Linda Hogan and quotes “For us, the animals are understood to be our equals. They are still our teachers. They are our helpers and healers. They have been our guardians and we have been theirs.”[12] Through the eyes of the colonizer, buffalo were seen to be the same as Indigenous bodies, an essentializing correlation which dehumanizes Indigenous peoples to the role of non-human.[13] Demonstrating this conflation, Hubbard writes that British soldiers were told by their captains to “kill every Buffalo you can! Every Buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”[14]
Strong demonstrates the importance of buffalo to community throughout the film. After the protagonist receives a vision of buffalo hunters riding across the prairies by train car, the character is transferred to a dark, grassy field lined with buffalo ghosts. Strong does not depict the buffalo ghosts as monstrous, but rather the apparitions remind the audience of the genocide which ripples across historical and contemporary life. Strong visually mirrors their protagonist with the massive line of buffalo apparitions, a reflexive visual tool to synthesize Indigenous experience with the buffalo’s communal importance in the past and present. The dichotomy between the protagonist living in present day and the haunting of the slaughtered buffalo creates an affective relationship across time, displacing the linear progressivist time of manifest destiny for human-nonhuman relationality in non-linear cyclical time. Strong collapses the past and present, allowing the audience to contemplate the countless communities and ecosystems which have been systemically eradicated during the establishment of the settler project known today as “Canada.” The colonizer may have devastated buffalo populations across North America, but the abject ghosts will always return as a reminder of the haunting of their genocide.
Strong also represents the dialectical violence of language in her film. Under Canada’s first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, the government of Canada established a document titled The Indian Act (1876) which systematically removed Indigenous peoples from their lands and displaced Indigenous children from their families to attend residential schools. After their forced kidnapping from their land, the Canadian government established reserve systems to confine Indigenous peoples within a small, segregated plot of land. The Indian act is the boogeyman of the film. Strong demonstrates the violence of the Indian Act through glimpses of the residential school as a haunted house and the wide-spread mass murder of buffalo on stolen land. Language is a binding force in horror, subjectivizing Indigenous peoples as colonial property under the Indian Act. By introducing a written document of Indigenous erasure and genocide throughout the film, Strong visualizes how language transforms subjectivation into a lived reality through the physical ramifications of abjection including Indigenous cultural assimilation and the destruction of their homes and ecosystems.
Strong’s acknowledgement of the buffalo and their family’s experiences under colonialism challenges the I/Other dichotomy used in horror film by complicating the bifurcation of subjection. Strong is speaking as creative subject, author, and individual who has experienced the violence of colonization. Instead of adopting the structure of the I, being the killer, and the Other, their vulnerable target, Strong complicates the narrative by giving visual sovereignty to the abject as a reclaimed image of lived experience rather than a patriarchal signifier. Strong allows their community’s stories to be told in Michif, placing agency into the hands of Metis people. Ojibwe storytelling also replaces the Indian Act’s subjectivation in the linguistic transference between Flesh and World, providing stories from community to guide the narratives of the film. This linguistic intervention replaces colonial ideology with Indigenous agency in own-voice storytelling, reshaping the language of the colonizer to the language of Michif survivance. Rather than relying on the haunting of the Other, Strong’s intervention into the horror genre visualizes colonial violence as the true horror for Indigenous peoples. By transgressing colonial ideology through the intervention of lived experience and oral histories, Four Faces of the Moon unmasks the face of the killer – the apparatus of manifest destiny made visible in the railway system and the residential school.
The Nightingale (2018)
Soaring over the vast open waters of the Pacific Ocean, Indigenous horror film also emerges in settler Australia. In the collaborative text “A Glossary of Haunting” by artists and writers Eve Tuck and C. Ree, the authors note that “Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets: genocide, desecration, poxed blankets, rape, humiliation. Settler colonialism, then, because it is a structure and not just the nefarious way nations are born (Wolfe, 1999), is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence.”[15] The 2018 film The Nightingale, directed by settler Australian Jennifer Kent (most notable for her directorial debut The Babadook) visualizes the invisibilities of colonial violence hidden by narratives of “progress” and “modernity” perpetuated by the British empire.[16] The Nightingale’s narrative structure mimics the 1970’s rape-revenge fantasy trope featured in films like I Spit on Your Grave (1978) where the assaulted protagonist seeks revenge on her abusers. However, The Nightingale nuances the stereotype through weaving Indigenous trauma into the settler narrative, revealing the complex ties of colonial powers upon both Irish and Tasmanian subjects.
Set in 1825, The Nightingale portrays a historical-fictional account of the protagonist Clare, played by Aisling Franciosi, living with her husband and newborn baby in the colony of Tasmania where she works as a waitress and a songstress for the local British soldiers. Clare is an enslaved Irish worker, owned by a British commandant who forces her to perform nonconsensual sexual acts with him. After trying to escape from her captor, the commandant and his soldiers rape Clare multiple times and kill her husband and child in the process. After the sexual assault and murder, the commandant and his soldiers flee the scene to take up positions of power in the north. Seeking revenge, Clare enlists the help of a Letteremairrener tracker named Billy, played by Baykali Ganambarr, who guides Clare through the wilderness of the Tasmanian colony. The majority of the film traces Clare and Billy’s journey up north, encountering the corpses of Indigenous peoples in the wake of travelling British soldiers. The climax of the film delivers a blow to Billy, where he learns from another Tasmanian that he is the last of the Letteremairrener people. Arriving northward and encountering the commandant in a bar surrounded by other British officers, Clare confronts the group and exposes his crimes to his fellow officers. Clare sings the Irish song of the nightingale to the commandant, the same song he would make her sing prior to being assaulted by him. That night, Billy paints his body with warrior paint and storms the tavern, spearing all of the British officers in the neck. During the raid, Billy is shot in the stomach by an officer and is badly wounded. Billy and Clare escape and hide at a beach illuminated by the orange light of dawn. Despite his injuries, Billy performs the dance of the Mandana blackbird on the beach – a dance which Billy had inherited from the Letteremairrener peoples. Billy then collapses onto the sand after he completes the dance. Clare looks off into the distance and sings an Irish hymn, closing the film on a beautiful-yet-haunting song.
The Nightingale depicts the violence of colonization through a de-glorified lens, leaving bodily horror uncensored for the audience. When The Nightingale premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018, the screening was accompanied by trauma therapists to help any viewers who were triggered by the violence in the film. The film was both praised and criticized for its depictions of sexual assault and murder, even sparking a walk-out by one movie-goer who shouted “she’s already been raped, we don’t need to see it again!”[17] While the tactic of “trauma porn” has been a marketing tool for promoting horror films including The Exorcist and Raw, The Nightingale intentionally depicts violence as an undeniable force in colonial expansionism. By unravelling the invisible violence of land seizure and genocide, Kent visualizes the horrors behind Australia’s project of “modernization.”
The Nightingale illuminates every aspect of settler violence for the audience. Whether it be the close-up shots of dead Tasmanians hanging from ropes in the deep Australian forest to the seemingly unending rape scenes of Irish and Tasmanian women, the film is a direct retaliation against the mysticism of “progress” within the British colonies. The Nightingale is so violent that Kent includes a smoke ceremony half-way through the film. The ceremony is performed by Billy to cleanse the audience and his character of the trauma depicted on-screen. While Kent is a settler to Australia, she discovered Ganambarr through watching a video of him dancing in ceremony and asked him to audition.[18] Never having acted before, Kent trusted Ganambarr and gave him the role to showcase his training in ceremony through his Mandana blackbird dance and smoke ceremonies. By using Tasmanian dancers to perform real ceremony from Letteremairrener communities, lived experience is interjected into the film to demystify fetishized depictions of Indigenous cultures in Australia while also providing a voice for those still affected by the ongoing racism and violence embedded in Tasmania.
While moments of rest and healing are few and far between, The Nightingale uses violence as a tactic of survivance rather than a cyclical visualization of trauma. In Australia and Tasmania in the 1820’s, large wars broke out across the colonies between British and Indigenous peoples over the crimes of territorial expansion. Henry Reynolds writes in his book A History of Tasmania that during the 30-year period of “Black Wars,” at least 90 percent of Indigenous populations died from European genocide.[19] While some Tasmanians spoke English and communicated with British colonizers, including the character of Billy in The Nightingale, Reynolds notes:
The increase in conflict coincided with, and was clearly related to, the rapid expansion of settlement between 1820 and 1830. There were only 5400 Europeans in Tasmania in 1820; 10 years later there were over 24, 000. Over the same period large areas of land – over 2 million acres – had been granted and by 1830 over 50, 000 acres were in cultivation.[20]
Despite salvationist ideologies emerging from British settlers, Kent visualizes the moment of the 1820’s as a period of extreme violence and injustice across settler Australia. While Reynold’s book notes the devastating statistics of genocide, the author still continues to demonize the Tasmanian people as the aggressors against the British. Reynold even notes that until the 1820’s, British colonizers viewed Tasmanian peoples as “submissive” to their presence on the island and then turned to violence after Britain started cultivating land. Unlike biased historical scholarship, The Nightingale clearly demarcates British colonial subjection and expansion as an unshakable force of violence.
The tactic of subjectivation against the colonized was not limited to Australia. In Frantz Fanon’s monumental book The Wretched of the Earth, the psychoanalyst actively encourages the peoples of Algeria to enact violence – both physical and psychic – against the French colonizers. Reading Fanon’s decolonial tactics of subjective annihilation, Glen Coulthard notes that:
Fanon describes the experience of colonial recognition in profoundly negative terms, like being “fixed” or ‘walled in” by the violating “gaze” of another. Far from being emancipatory and self-confirming, recognition is instead cast as a “suffocating reification,” a “hemorrhage” that cause the colonized to collapse into self-objectification.[21]
Kent directly confronts Fanon’s fears of self-objectification through the tactic of violence. Billy and Clare travel great lengths to seek revenge on their abusers, utilizing the horror trope of the rape-revenge fantasy. However, unlike the catharsis of blood splatter and genital mutilation in revenge films including I Spit on your Grave (1978) and Kill Bill (2003), The Nightingale uses violence to destabilize the “self-objectification” of colonial subjection. Billy and Clare aim to kill their abusers, erasing the dichotomy of the colonizer/colonized power structure by literally erasing the colonizer from existence. By murdering their abusers, these acts of vengeance desublimate Billy and Clare out of a politics of recognition by erasing the bifurcated roles of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, a psychoanalytic transference used in Fanon’s critical analysis of the I and Other. The Other becomes the I, de-subjectifying the protagonists from their position as an enslaved commodity for the oppressor. Through Billy’s mass-murder of the British officers and Clare’s reclamation of her family’s Irish song from the pleasure of her abuser, The Nightingale pierces the I/Other dichotomy by eliminating the physical presence of their abusers. Kent’s film provides Billy with catharsis from the loss of his family and allows possibility for healing through ceremony and song. Billy’s ceremonial dances are especially powerful given the longstanding ban on Indigenous ceremony in British colonies like that of the potlatch ban across settler Canada (1885-1951). Although the gore-ridden film is difficult to watch, The Nightingale uses violence to destabilize the subjectivation of Indigeneity as an “otherness’ through mobilizing violence as a tool for social disruption.
Kent’s inclusion of experienced Tasmanian dancers and community members also dismantles the lineage of the objectification of Indigenous culture in films and photography. While I acknowledge that the film may be interpreted as “trauma porn” through Kent’s positionality as a white settler, I highlight The Nightingale as Indigenous horror through the role that Indigenous communities across Tasmania played in the production of the film. By employing the rape-revenge trope to depict British genocide in Australia and Tasmania, Kent reflects the narrative of white supremacy on the pixilated screen. The Nightingale transcends the descriptive boundaries of “horror” to reshape the base of horror itself. Historicity, the discourse of expansion-as-progress concretized in Reynold’s book, is horror insofar as it is celebrated as true, and lived experience replaces the textbooks and films of glorified colonial fetishism with Indigenous life.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls (2014)
Eve Tuck and C. Ree reminds the reader in “A Glossary of Haunting” that the “Haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide.”[22] Kristeva and Fanon’s theorizations of subjugation through psychoanalysis, the apparatus of a “citizen-making” body politic, is foremost an abstract linguistic dialectic which directly affects the lives of individuals caught under the umbrella of identity politics. Returning to a pioneering creative in Indigenous horror film, Jeff Barnaby’s first film Rhymes for Young Ghouls was one of the earliest keystones to mold the new genre.[23] While Blood Quantum tackles colonization from the singular perspective of the zombie film, Rhymes for Young Ghouls weaves together tropes from several horror genres into a narrative of survivance under the colonial regime of Canada in the 1960’s.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls takes place on the same reservation as Blood Quantum, Red Crow Indian Reservation, in 1969. The film opens with the same format as Four Faces of the Moon, a textual acknowledgement to situate the audience with a historical groundwork.
The on-screen text is taken from the Indian Act (1876):
The law in the kingdom decreed that every child between the age of 5 and 16 who is physically able must attend Indian Residential School. Her Majesty’s attendants, to be called truant officers, will take into custody a child whom they believe to be absent from school using as much force as the circumstance requires. A person caring for an Indian child who fails to cause such a child to attend school shall immediately be imprisoned, and such person arrested without warrant and said child conveyed to school by the truant officer.
Indian Act, by will of her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada.[24]
Immediately, Barnaby utilizes existing linguistic frameworks of subjectivation. Setting the scene for his intervention into the impacts of Canadian policy onto Indigenous life, Barnaby frames the Indian Act as the invisible horror-made-visible through textual recognition on the screen.
The introductory scene of the film positions the viewer in a kitchen of dizzying chaos, where two men and a woman drink and smoke into the early hours of the morning. Outside, their children – the protagonist Aila and her younger brother Tyler – sit on the hood of a car waiting for their parents to finish partying. In an attempt to drive home intoxicated, Aila’s mother, Anna, places Aila in her lap to help her steer. Aila reverses over a bump, which is gruesomely unveiled to be her little brother’s head. The death of her young son drives Anna to suicide by hanging, and her father accepting a prison sentence for manslaughter. The next day, Aila finds her mother’s body hanging on the deck, sparking the older Aila to intervene through voice over – “The day I found my mother dead, I aged by 1000 years.”[25] Jumping to the present-day of 1976, Barnaby unravels the power hierarchies in Red Crow under the control of a government Indian Agent, named Popper, who is both the acting head of the residential school and criminal landlord extorting funds from a local strip club. The characters on the reservation, all dressed in dystopic costuming, become tangled in a raid at the bar led by Popper. The irony is clear to Aila, Popper simultaneously runs the strip club but charges those who attend for criminal activity and places their children in the residential school, gaining money from his own crimes and fueling the machine of British assimilation. After her money is stolen by Popper in the reservation-wide raid, Aila develops a plan to infiltrate the residential school to reclaim her money and flee the reservation to a bigger city.
Barnaby interlaces the lived realities of individuals under the Indian Act’s racist policies with the narrative structure of visual sovereignty. From Aila’s father returning from jail and facing the traumas of his experience in the residential school by coping through alcohol abuse, to Aila’s temporary job as a drug dealer to make money for her new life, Barnaby visualizes reality under colonialism as a continuous fight against the monstrosity of substance abuse, mass-incarceration, and racism. Barnaby is careful not to demonize his protagonists for their coping mechanisms, reversing the processes of “othering” onto the invasive character of Popper. Aila is eventually caught for her plot to steal back the money and is placed in residential school but is freed by a troop of her friends. The film ends with Popper tracking down Aila in an attempt to rape and murder her for escaping the residential school and stealing her money back. However, Popper is stopped when a young boy shoots him in the back of the head with a shot gun. While the plot of the film is simple in narrative form, Barnaby complicates the genre through visual storytelling.
A precursor to the imagery of Blood Quantum, Barnaby includes the figure of the zombie in Aila’s dreams. Throughout the film, Aila experiences visions of her dead mother, crawling out of her grave as a zombie. Zombification in both horror cinema and history are intrinsically linked with the “other” through European colonization. Originally emerging out of Africa, the zombie represented a figure of an enslaved African who had been transformed through voodoo to perform slave-work for their master.[26] The creation of the zombie allowed the slave-owner to control the zombie’s actions through magic, manipulating their behaviour to act in favour of their owner. The zombie became of interest for the European and Hollywood elite, justifying racial hierarchies to vilify Black bodies and concretize white populations as “corruptible” to Black persuasion. The trope of the zombie was cultivated by the horror film industry, taking center-stage as the monster of Hollywood films including White Zombie (1932) and Revolt of the Zombies (1936). In White Zombie, the white Haitian voodoo slave-owner, played by Bela Legosi, forces his zombie slaves to transform the female protagonist into his zombified wife.[27] The film’s symbolism of the zombie is clear: a racist, lifeless trope whose monstrousness penetrates the sexualized white female, perpetuating the dichotomy of the vilified Black male and the helpless white female. The dangerous racist stereotype wasn’t challenged until George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, where the protagonist Ben, played by the Black actor Duane Jones, must protect a white family from the impending zombie invasion.[28] Romero’s zombie became a reflexive symbol of the violent consequences of human action, from slavery (Night of the Living Dead, 1968), to ideological fascism (Pontypool, 2008), and climate change (The Dead Don’t Die, 2019).
Barnaby co-opts the reflexive trope of the zombie through the haunting of trauma within colonial assimilation. Anna, who coped with her trauma through alcohol abuse, tragically took her own life after accidentally killing her young son. The zombified Anna haunts Aila’s dreams, a reminder of the ongoing trauma of racist policies reflected by Popper and the Indian Act throughout the film. The zombie is strategic for Barnaby in his films, stating that he was “trying to bring the zombie back into the political arena and have it represent something other than zombie porn.”[29] Anna’s presence as a zombie reverses colonial othering, haunting the audience as a reminder of the violence disproportionally affecting Indigenous women across North America. By inverting the zombie as a racist signifier to a commentary on cyclical trauma, being the trauma of Anna’s experiences of racism and Aila’s trauma from discovering her mother’s corpse, Barnaby co-opts the trope of the horror genre into a new sphere of reflexivity on the monstrousness of colonial subjection perpetuated by policies including the Indian Act and the abusive education system of the residential school.
The zombie isn’t the only horror trope which Barnaby includes in his films. Aila’s grandmother tells the story of the “Wolf and the Mushroom” describing the oral history of Mi’kmaq origin. The story tells of a wolf who comes across a tree with hanging children. The wolf, hallucinatory from his exhaustion, believes the hanging children are mushrooms and eats them. When the wolf becomes conscious and sees that he has eaten children instead of mushrooms, he eats his entire body until only his skull is left. The entire sequence is rendered in animation, similar to the haunting images in Four Faces of the Moon. Barnaby’s inclusion of Indigenous horror stories also intervenes in the horror genre, integrating oral histories of horror which are deeply embedded in Mi’kmaq communities today. Barnaby’s reworking of the zombie alongside Mi’kmaq horror creates the foundation for the new genre of horror: a reflexive commentary on the monstrosity of colonization while providing a space for Mi’kmaq storytelling through honouring community.
Rhymes for Young Ghouls also intervenes with Kristeva’s dialectical analysis of horror through reversing linguistic subjection within the Indian Act against itself, replacing colonial ideals of the assimilated subject with Barnaby’s representation of Indigenous worldviews. The Indian Act is delegitimized as an apparatus of subjectivation, providing agency for Barnaby’s characters as sovereign individuals to display their own traumas as horrific. Affective relations between Anna and her family inverts I/Other dichotomies, allowing for a sovereign space of connection to community and lived experiences in a continual conversation within-and-beyond the horror genre. Through creating a safe space for depicting trauma, the new Indigenous horror film genre destabilizes psychoanalysis as the singular dialectic of horror scholarship.
With the rise of Indigenous horror across global cinemas, opportunities for nuanced conversations around the ongoing effects of colonization take shape through laying bare the invisible structures of subjection in the medium of the horror film. Through the analysis of three horror films, Four Faces of the Moon, The Nightingale, and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, I reveal how Indigenous horror has proven to be an integral component of its parent genre, a genre historically caught between reactive conservativism and human rights. By placing psychoanalytic discourse in conversation with oral histories and community-based epistemologies, Indigenous horror creates avenues for new films on the horizon of social change. A path is set for a new platform of horror – a horror transcending the visual plain to striate the border between “I” and “Other,” “Hero” and “Monster,” “Abject” and “Real.” In the dark corners of the night, through the thick fog and heavy scent, the haunting will always return.
[1] Jeff Barnaby. Blood Quantum. Film. Directed by Jeff Barnaby. Toronto: Elevation Pictures, 2019.
[2] Alicia Elliott. “The Rise of Indigenous Horror: How a Fiction Genre Is Confronting a Monstrous Reality | CBC Arts.” CBCnews. CBC/Radio Canada, October 17, 2019.
[3] I acknowledge my positionality as a white Acadian settler in the colonial state of Canada and within the paper, I will not claim any oral stories as my own. Rather, I will use oral histories as a mode of pushing against the strict framework of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to demonstrate the tactics of the new genre of the Indigenous horror film in conjunction with feminist deconstruction through Julia Kristeva’s writings.
[4] Amanda Strong uses they/them pronouns and the usage of “they” throughout this chapter will be a reference to Strong and Strong’s protagonist throughout Four Faces of the Moon.
[5] Amanda Strong. Four Faces of the Moon. Short Film. Directed by Amanda Strong. Vancouver: Spotted Fawn Productions, 2016.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
[9] Ibid, 5.
[10] Julia Kristeva, Passions of Our Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 114.
[11] Ibid, 115.
[12] Tasha Hubbard., “Buffalo Genocide in Nineteenth-Century North America.” In Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, and Jeff Benvenuto, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 294.
[13] Ibid, 293.
[14] Ibid, 296.
[15] Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “Exemplar Chapter 33: A Glossary of Haunting”, (2013), Web. Accessible: http://www.evetuck.com/writing.
[16] Jennifer Kent. The Nightingale. Film. Directed by Jennifer Kent. Australia: Transmission Films, 2018.
[17] Kristy Johnson “Viewers Walk out of The Nightingale Premiere after Rape Scenes.” Daily Mail Online. Associated Newspapers, June 11, 2019. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7122887/Viewers-walk-Nightingale-premiere-rape-scenes.html.
[18] Build Series, “Jennifer Kent & Baykali Ganambarr Discuss the Film, “The Nightingale”, YouTube video, 39:25, August 1, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_YrG1ufhgk
[19] Henry Reynolds, A History of Tasmania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 47.
[20] Ibid, 51.
[21] Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 139.
[22] Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “Exemplar Chapter 33: A Glossary of Haunting.”
[23] Jeff Barnaby. Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Film. Directed by Jeff Barnaby. Montreal: Prospector Films, 2014.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid.
[26] “White Zombie.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: The Francophone Caribbean and North America 15, no. 1 (2011), 49.
[27] Ibid.
[28] George Romero. Night of the Living Dead. Film. Directed by George A. Romero. Pittsburgh: Image Ten, 1968.
[29] Tiff Talks., “BLOOD QUANTUM Cast and Crew Q&A – TIFF 2019”, YouTube Video, 27:09, September 6, 2019.