Welcome to the horror show. Settler colonialism, gender and the horror film

Settler colonialism is everyday violence, so immense and at times almost unfathomable, but so central to all that structures everyday life on Turtle Island (North America), that it demands our attention and social justice commitments. Intent on erasing Indigenous Peoples, settler colonialism is an intertwined system, dependent on gender and sexual violence (Finley, 2011). The real horrors of colonization are obscured but the horror film tells us that something is very wrong here. At the same time, horror films tend to reinforce settler colonialism, disappearing or appropriating Indigenous people and cultures, while critical theory dealing with the genre rarely deals with Indigenous Peoples. The purpose of this short paper is to analyze horror as a series of stories that challenge, in some ways, but also uphold, in others, those colonial systems of power that expand like monstrous tendrils. The horror film, more than any other genre, provides a glimpse—an open window or attic door—into the horrors of settler colonial violence, but it also rests on a promise of white settler family and community survival, and the erasure of Indigenous Peoples from present and future worlds. Certainly, horror has been deemed more progressive, in many ways, than other genres, disrupting as it does the everyday, providing opportunity for subversion of gender, sexual/heteronormative norms (Freeland, 2000). In stories of the cursed towns of Haddonfield (Halloween) and Woodsboro (Scream), where the Shape and Father Death, never leave, settlers are haunted—forever, it seems—by endless cycles of violence. In the townspeople make fun of survivors of Myers’ violence. They are killed for both memorializing (a form of denying the systemic nature of the haunting) and for denying. They literally drink while Michael Myers goes on a killing spree. A critique of the civilized becoming savage, comes up again in Halloween Kills, in which a group of townspeople take turns stabbing and shooting and beating Michael Myers. The town of Haddonfield, the town of Westboro, are not so civilized, it would seem. In Woodsboro, the settler town that is set in, youth gather to drink and party and are picked off when they let their guard down. Their towns have no happy endings, which is to say, they are unsettled—almost. In some ways, this makes these films more interesting, but as with the survivors of Zombieland (2009, 2019) the commitment ultimately is to the continuance of white settler society, now fully actualized as victims of an apocalypse, readied to replace the Indigenous presence. However, the monsters of Halloween and Scream reinforce the gendered violence of settler colonialism, so any assessment of their role as a disruptor is complicated. In some ways, horror can be seen to unsettle settler colonialism by revealing that the small settler town, the frontier-village, or the suburban street, are not really settled—not safely, not well—and never really will be. Horror unsettles by making monsters who are both Other (Michael Myers brings reminders of pagan spirits to the settler town of Haddonfield) and core to the systems they disrupt (Myers is also a misogynist killer who was born in Haddonfield). The horror genre can be re-read as reflective of the violence of settler colonialism which encompasses gender/sexual violence as core to its workings. Horror disrupts, as Michael Myers brings an unexplained (and therefore terrifying) need to eradicate the safety of the white settler frontier-town of Haddonfield, again and again. The structures of the town—policing, hospitals, even fire fighters—can do nothing to stop Myers. In Halloween Kills, Myers kills as many people as he can get his hands on, including the entire fire department. There is a moment of wondering if he is the ultimate disruptor, but the fact that Myers’ first ever kill was his half-naked sister makes him a familiar monster, one rooted in settler colonial misogyny. Horror may disrupt, in some ways, but it is still produced and consumed by audiences who are mired in a colonial system that works by obscuring its many layers and workings. Indigenous people are disappeared from Haddonfield, and like so many horror films, the latest films seem intent on punishing Black women in particular. Black women do not survive the latest Halloween trilogy, or any of the series of films. The Final Girl is always Laurie, and in the end, she is also a paradox of adherence to law enforcement, then vigilantism, mental health struggles, then “healing” arcs, non-heteronormativity, and then heteronormativity. Settler colonialism intertwined with anti-Black racism and misogyny is reinforced most strikingly it seems, when the Final Girls end up with their law enforcement male partners, as both and Halloween Ends (2022) allude to. When reframed through a settler colonial studies lens, in which the disappearance of Indigenous Peoples is resisted, and the survival of white settler familial structures is disrupted, the genre takes on new meaning/s. The Civ/Sav construct of human development, (see Green Inferno, 2013) is still embedded in films like as the audience is forced to ask if “the mob” (survivors of Michael Myers’ original 1978 massacre included) are “just as bad as Michael himself” as they hunt and then attempt to kill him, rather than allow law enforcement to take him into custody. We can also revisit the Indian Burial Ground trope yet again as kept it alive. Fulfilling similar objectives—to freeze Indigenous people in the past, as a naturally disappearing race, intent on supporting the new owners of the land, the white settler families whom they help (like the family of Poltergeist films)—the appearance of fake Indigenous totems in used to defeat the shape-shifting Pennywise, is there to remind us that the survival of white settler towns and suburbs is the ultimate happy ending in horror. Even as daily life is disrupted, the frontier survives. Ultimately, the survival of the white settler family, the village, suburban community, or small town, is central to American horror. Settler colonialism is about systemically eradicating Indigenous Peoples and land rights, in order to replace with white settler society (in a short summary of the concept) and it is also about upholding the hetero-patriarchal family that gives body and form to its systemic nature—it is a “structure, not an event” (Wolfe, 2006). At the same time, cheering on the monster—the Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger or Ghostface figures—isn't all that subversive when the gendered and sexualized violence (Michael's first kill is of his sister while she sits half-naked in front of a mirror) are understood as pillars in settler colonial systems. Horror may be “preoccupied with issues of sexual difference and gender (Grant, 1996, p.1)” but this does not make it necessarily subversive. Settler society is shown its own poisoned, violent core, but on the other, we are ultimately made to cheer for its survival. The power of the Indian Burial Ground trope lies in its ability to center and make victim the white settler family. The Creed family of is there to settle the land as a natural progression in the grand scheme of things, after the Indigenous people have run off. The land is frightening, the spirits of place are frightening. The story is about many aspects of settler colonial society, and the ways that its families are never quite safe, though they are also never quite undone. Still, the family is what we are convinced we must cheer for. The appropriation of the Wendigo figure in the latest Pet Sematary pits the white settler family against the evil Indigenous (spirit) Other. Tuck and Ree (2013) argue that within mainstream American horror, there is a preoccupation “with the hero, who is perfectly innocent, but who is assaulted by monstering or haunting just the same” (p.640.’). In the killers are mocked by their own self-referential dialogue. It is a film that calls out the violence of online communities, who use forums like 4chan to organize (Ling, 2022). The killers, an older man and his (underage) online girlfriend, are written to be hated. He is a symbol of misogynist online life, attempting to kill Sidney for his terrible movie because “nobody understands fans.” In Halloween Kills, Michael Myers returns as a patriarchal force, killing women, particularly Black women, in brutal ways, and murdering two gay men before displaying their bodies in mockery. Ghostface and Myers remind their towns that they are never safe, never quite right. In the end, though, Woodsboro always seems to survive its own violent underbelly. The Final Girl may survive, as Sidney does, again and again, but her survival comes in order to ensure that the town and the families therein are constant. At the very least, Michael Myers and Ghostface provide some rupture of the fabric of the safe little suburb or small town of the settler colonial imagination. It certainly feels like a moment to cheer when Melissa Barrera's Sam Carpenter stabs the main killer 20-something times (though the kind of cute reappearance of the original Billy Loomis character in a helpful dad moment undermines this moment of empowerment slightly). Another recent film reinforces the importance of settler colonial theory in horror analysis. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) presents the viewer with a white supremacist vision of Leatherface and his kin (a woman named Mrs MC who lectures the viewer about the Confederate Flag and calls a doomed young Black character “boy” before dying). Leatherface even chainsaws his way through Sally Hardesty, who returns to hunt him down only to die in a mockery of an original Final Girl. Texas is redrawn emphatically as a landscape for white settlers when Leatherface mows down a busload of young people, mainly Black women, who perpetuate a kind of reverse invasion fantasy. As “gentrifiers” these young, diverse people are the real colonizers, we are led to believe, before the chainsaws start whirring. This fear, of reverse colonization, is a particular trope of settler colonial horror writing, common in films like Dracula (see Arata, 1990) and apocalyptic zombie films. Stranger still, are the ways that the Leatherface and his family are constantly redrawn as a kind of “Indigenous” presence in rural Texas. Codified as Indigenous, through stereotypical uses of animal skins, teeth, fur (Clover, 1992, p.156) and of course behaviour within the construct of the “savage,” namely killing and cannibalism. There are no actual Indigenous people left in the Texas landscape, so Leatherface is a stand-in, punishing as he does nosy, snobby urban people who are the real colonizers. My argument is essential that the horror film, and critical scholarship focused on horror, are worth re-examining in order to disrupt settler colonial storytelling. Settler colonialism is the real nightmare, and while horror disrupts the fabric from time to time, the genre could do much more, to tear at the fabric of our storied world.

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