I’ve been consuming horror films and books from perhaps a too young age, though it’s worked out fine for me. It’s been a formative genre for me as a writer and a person. I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it premiered, when I was eight years old, and it was long my favorite show. Our parents showed my sister and I Children of the Corn when I was around the same age before an outing to a Halloween-themed corn maze, and Jaws before swimming in the ocean. Neither of my parents are huge horror fans, and I doubt they thought these movies would make such an impression—a lifelong love was created for me, while my sister cannot handle even the trailer for a horror-comedy.
One of the strengths of horror as a genre is that it can externalize the internal turmoil of an individual or society; it can make manifest a fear, often collective in some sense—of death, of foreignness, of invasion, subjugation. Horror finds an audience perhaps because we do not fear in isolation, despite what we may tell ourselves. We want to know what horrifies others, and sometimes what horrifies ourselves. We don’t always have the words, or the images, for that gnawing, pressured feeling, or we don’t know why we fear what we fear. Horror is an attempt to know ourselves on multiple levels, to parse out what isn’t working in our lives. The monsters we make are truly horrifying when they can touch a truth within us, whether previously known to us or not. This revelation of truth can be particularly impactful, even oddly poignant, when it comes to us through horror.
I’m interested in using the genre to outwardly express the inner turmoil of living under contemporary colonization that many Native people feel. Colonial societies breed discontent in many, many ways but I’m particularly interested in how violence manifests under colonial conditions, both against and by Indigenous people. I’m interested in critically examining the machinations of white supremacy and colonization, both overt and subtle, and how it creates and maintains the circumstances for different types of violence.
Indigenous people are marginalized in multiple ways in the West, meaning we tend to bear the brunt of systemic and individual violence. In Canada, the rates of ‘domestic’ violence (why this separation of ‘private’ or ‘public’ violence?), homicide, suicide, police brutality, child removal, and incarceration that Indigenous people face are astounding, often as much as four or more times higher than white people. At the same time, Indigenous individuals are also capable of committing violence, thus creating multiple layers of damage in communities.
Violence has the peculiar property of being born both of power and from the lack of it. In the contexts of the prairies, as in many other colonized places, violence doesn’t have one root cause; it is not some miasmic force that envelopes humans, a poisonous fog from a hellish place, an act of the devil—it’s a human behavior, driven by human emotions. It can be bred from privilege, entitlement, devastation, hopelessness, jealousy, rage, righteousness, revenge. This doesn’t necessarily mean all humans will be violent if given the right circumstances, and indeed does not mean that all acts of violence are a product of society’s circumstances—violence is still an individual decision, a choice made, an action taken. People can be driven to certain states of minds and they can be violent because they like it. Many things can, and almost always are, true at once.
Nuance is an important tool for illuminating complex ideas and situations, but it’s equally important to remember where the locus of power lies in a colonial society. Economic, political, social and cultural power do not rest with Indigenous people in the West; we must advocate and fight for any recognition we may gain within any mode of power, and still the scales are loath to tip. The prairies are achingly beautiful, with vibrant cultural and arts scenes in many cities, with Indigenous people leading the way in innovative social programs, in reconciliation efforts—but there is still a lot that needs to change, on the prairies and across the country.
The visceral nature of the experience of horror, the ability to invoke an embodied feeling in a reader or viewer, can communicate a truth, a feeling, a perspective, to audiences in ways that other genres cannot. Violence is a real-life horror, and I don’t have an interest in recreating or prolonging real hurt, real suffering, by using it as a mere spectacle. Using the lens of horror for social commentary and exploration is not going to be for everyone, but I believe there are ways to do it that can allow us to imagine different possibilities, and to see the societies we live in more clearly.
I’m drawn to exploring violence because its tentacles entwine so many of our systems, beliefs, ideologies, and actions. Violence is enacted in as many different ways as human beings can feel, and yet is rarely openly discussed. When it is discussed, nuance and complexity tends to be easily wiped out by emotion, which can also color how we view perpetrators, victims, and certain acts. Some violence is more tolerable than others, which I’m also interested in exploring.
We tend to turn away from the heavier, unpleasant things, or dismiss them as not being our problem. Yet we all stand on the same foundation. We have to be able to see it clearly, all the beauty, joy, mess, and pain of our lives and behaviors if we truly hope for anything close to an equitable or just society. I want to use horror to see clearly, to know myself, to know the places in which I live and the ideologies I live within, willingly or not. Foundations hold us up or allow us to fall, and a rotten one to begin with is a rotten one five hundred years later.
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