Turning a lens on the dark legacy of colonialism in horror film, from Scream to Halloween and beyond

Horror films, more than any other genre, offer a chilling glimpse—like peering through a creaky attic door—into the brutality of settler colonial violence. While Indigenous peoples continue to struggle against colonization, white settler narratives consistently position them as a threat, depicting the Indigenous Other as an ever-present menace, lurking on the fringes of "civilized" society. Indigenous inclusion or exclusion in horror films tells a larger story about myths, fears, and anxieties that have endured for centuries.

Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes traces connections between Indigenous representations, gender, and sexuality within iconic horror classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th. The savage killer, the romantic and doomed Indian, the feral "mad woman"—no trope or archetype escapes the shadowy influence of settler colonialism. In the end, horror both disrupts and uncovers colonial violence—only to bury its victims once more.

LAURA HALL grew up in N'Swakamok (Sudbury, Ontario). Laura's parents, Shirley (Mohawk) and Dave Hall (English-Canadian) instilled in her a deep love for spooky storytelling. After moving to different cities in Ontario for University and graduate studies, Laura now resides in Ottawa with their children and partner and works as a professor in Sociology at Carleton University. Currently, Dr. Hall is working on horror fiction and storytelling workshops with support from federal grants and a general focus on arts-based research and Indigenous wellbeing.

JORDAN ABEL (Host) is a queer Nisga'a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). NISHGA won both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award, and was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. Abel's latest work–a novel titled Empty Spaces– was published by McClelland & Stewart and Yale University Press, and was the winner of the Governor General's Award for fiction as well as the winner of a Banff Mountain Book Award. Abel completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing.

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