America’s Original Sin—Top Ten Movies About the Horrors of Settler Colonialism

“Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow.”

-Red (Lupita Nyong’o), Us (2019)

We live in a haunted house. The founding of the American nation began with a moment of sweeping amnesia about its defining structure—settler colonialism, a form of colonization that replaces the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers.[1] From depopulation to the reservation system[2], the residential school system[3] to the plantation system[4], settler colonialism as an ongoing process depends upon a constant flow of physical and cultural violence. Colonization is as horrific as humanity gets—genocide, desecration, pox-blankets, rape, humiliation—and it is the way nations are born. It is an ongoing horror made invisible by its persistence. And yet since the inception of film, the horror genre has, perhaps sneakily, participated in, portrayed, and resisted settler colonialism, ensuring at the very least that it remains visible. Horror movies invite us to rethink the roles that fear, guilt, shame, and history play in the way we conceive of the United States as a nation founded through settler colonialism.[5] They unveil the American experience as based on genocide and exploitation and force us to consider horror as a genre about marginalization and erasure. The ghosts in these films are “never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains.”[6] Most importantly, they force us to see them—the shadows of our sins.

The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Before Disney and Marvel gave us the Multiverse and its infinite potential for fan theories, there was The Shining. In addition to its own volume of Studies in the Horror Film and blogger Jonny53’s obsessively exhausting reading of the film (which takes approximately 12 hours to read, for the truly interested), The Shining’s fan theories form the subject of their own documentary, the masterful Room 237. But perhaps the Godfather of all Shining fan theories comes from Bill Blakemore, the ABC News correspondent who, in 1987, posited that Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is actually a meditation on America’s genocidal legacy.[7] From the Overlook Hotel’s location atop an “ancient Indian burial ground”—itself a troublesome trope in much of King’s oeuvre—to the famous Fourth of July Ball to the orientation of Indian chief logo on cans of Calumet baking powder in the hotel’s pantry, Blakemore finds our national failure to reckon with our founders’ annihilation of an entire race of people. Kubrick applies his subtle (or sometimes not-so-subtle) allusions to indigeneity not so much in sprinkles but in avalanches. Wendy’s Wild West-appliqued jacket, Danny’s Apollo 11 sweater, Jack’s reference to “white man’s burden”—once you see it, you see it everywhere.

The Shining is streaming on HBO Max and is available to rent or buy on Amazon.

White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1939)

There’s really no getting away from zombies in contemporary horror, whether they come in the form of “fast zombies” à la The Walking Dead and World War Z or their more romance-hungry cousins in Warm Bodies. But zombies as we know them today can only truly be traced to 1968, when George A. Romero filmed a cute little black-and-white number for less than $120,000 (see below). The word “zombie” was first recorded in English in 1819 in a history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, although he originally spelled the word “zombie,” as a reference to the Afro-Brazilian anti-colonialist Zumbi. Thus began the colonial appropriation of the zombie, which in Central African and Afro-Caribbean/Brazilian folklore is a dead person physically revived by an act of necromancy by a bokor, or a sorcerer/witch. Zombie beliefs in Haiti in particular are heavily influenced by colonization and slavery. Enslaved Africans brought their traditions to the New World, and sugar plantation owners turned those traditions against them; slave drivers would threaten slaves with possible zombification to discourage enslaved persons from committing suicide. While this culturally specific version of the zombie is largely absent from the modern-day zombie horror corpus, Victor Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie specifically takes its inspiration from Haitian zombie case histories. But we can hardly celebrate Halperin for somehow preserving a now-whitewashed folk tradition—quite the opposite. For Halperin puts the horror right in the title—this is a white zombie, and that’s the truly scary part. Halperin meshes Haitian zombie lore with the European Gothic tradition to tell the story of an American businessman (in Haiti during the US’s colonial exploits on the island) who hires an evil voodoo slave master (played with wonderfully hyperbolic absurdity by Bela Lugosi) to zombify a young white woman for his own sexual pleasure. If for no other reason, this movie is worth a watch for Bela Lugosi’s eyebrows, which deserve their own Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

White Zombie is streaming for free on Amazon and Tubi.

Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)

A fun (and highly telling in light of the whole White Zombie zombie-appropriation) fact about Romero’s unparalleled masterpiece: at no point during the writing, production, or promotion of Night of the Living Dead did Romero or anyone else affiliated with the film refer to the undead creatures that stalk the Pennsylvania farmhouse as “zombies.” Romero’s low-budget classic, now the Rosetta Stone for all zombie movies that came after, upended many of the genre conventions that horror audiences had come to expect. He gave us graphic violence, extensive gore, and an almost laughably low budget, then killed off every one of his main characters at the end. What places Night of the Living Dead among the horror films that grapple with settler colonialism is Ben, the undeniable protagonist in a genre more famous for portraying Black men either as animalistic villains or as inevitable victims. Ben shatters every stereotype—he is capable, developed, and unquestionably heroic. His death at the hands of a trigger-happy ghoul-hunting mob devastates every time, and the grainy photo montage during the credits of Ben’s body being impaled on large hooks and burned on a pyre recalls the many real-world lynchings of Black men throughout American history. It seems more than mere coincidence that Romero, while driving from Pittsburgh to New York City to start pitching his film, heard on the radio that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis while Night of the Living Dead rattled around in its cans in the trunk of his car.

You can stream Night of the Living Dead for free on multiple platforms, including Amazon and Tubi.

Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)

Bernard Rose’s early-90s adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden” arrived in the early days of, let’s just say, a not-great decade of American race relations (are any of them great, though?). The white director chose to change the story’s setting from contemporary Liverpool to the Cabrini-Green public housing development in Chicago, thereby shifting the underlying tension from class to race. The Cabrini-Green project had long been notorious for its poor construction, violence, and high crime rates, as well as its location nestled between upper-class neighborhoods. What’s more, Chicago’s massive neglect and mismanagement of its public housing had recently produced a horror story of its own—in 1983, Ruthie Mae McCoy, a resident of the Grace Abbott Homes, called 9-1-1 to report an intruder who was breaking into her apartment via the bathroom. While police paid a visit to Abbott, they didn’t actually enter Ruthie Mae’s apartment until three days later, when they found her dead, shot four times by an assailant who climbed into her bathroom through the medicine cabinet.[8] Sound familiar? But Ruthie Mae’s murder provides only half of the narrative heft of Rose’s adaptation. The other half of Candyman converts Barker’s story into an interracial “love” story that revives some of the more problematic representations of Black men lusting after powerless white women. Candyman must contend with the fact that it exists in an entertainment medium that has a long history of depicting these kinds of relationships in highly offensive and racist ways—D.W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation probably takes the cake as far as this is concerned; it also lives in a world where Black men could pay with their lives for any attention, even imaginary, that they paid to white women. Candyman might be just another ghost looking for love, but not from Black women; instead, he plays on fears of the big Black boogeyman coming in and taking away a white woman, a white woman who, through sacrificing herself to save a kidnapped baby and rid Cabrini-Green of its ghost, erases the histories of anti-Black violence that Candyman embodies and replaces those histories with her own. It’s astonishing to see what the story of Candyman can be in the hands of a director of color, and Nia DaCosta’s 2021 “spiritual sequel” returns the Candyman to his home.

You can rent Candyman on Amazon and other platforms.

The VVitch (Robert Eggers, 2015)

It’s perhaps not surprising that a film set during the early days of the New England colonies would have at least a superficial connection to settler colonialism. After all, “land is life—or at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be—indeed often are—contests for life.”[9] Desire for land and the perceived threat of preexisting indigenous communities, whose political structures clashed with Western notions of capitalism and private land ownership, led to violent clashes and, ultimately, relocation of many indigenous tribes. Part of the mythology of colonialism is that the colonizer moves from the safety, comfort, and civilization of the homeland to the danger, horror, and nature of the “New World,” and we can see how this plays out in Eggers’ directorial debut. The VVitch sees a family banished from Plymouth Colony after the father, William, accuses the town fathers of becoming too liberal—so already, we have as one of our main characters a man who was too conservative for the Puritans. But Eggers does not ask us to view William’s family as innocent, either in their persecution of each other or in their participation in the colonial project. Instead, we are asked to look at the film as a dark fairy tale told by a culture—our culture—that knows it has done something horrible but has no clue how to come to terms with it. Part of the horror of The VVitch is the family’s utter desolation on the edge of the woods, but their desolation is an isolation of their own making. The indigenous tribes who inhabited what became Massachusetts have been thoroughly banished, with a single sighting of two Native men and easily missed references to “Indian Tom” and “Indian magic” as the sole artifacts of a slaughtered civilization. But what makes Eggers’ film so fascinating—and so authentically Puritanical—is that it manages to be all about sex without ever mentioning sex at all. If colonization is a complicated matrix of power and control, then gender and sexuality are additional axes in this matrix. Colonies practiced a form of colonial natalism—the promotion of (white) birth through legal and social mechanisms—that actively displaced indigenous sexual structures that did not similarly center heterosexual male-female monogamous relationships as the end-all-be-all of acceptable sex.[10] The true threat in The VVitch, then, is not the indigenous peoples who populated the Indian captivity narratives with which the family would have been acquainted, nor the eponymous Witch herself. Rather, the horror lies within a family that has been banished from Western “civilization” with a teenage daughter in tow and no other families with whom they can propagate their new Eden. So let the incest begin.

The Witch is streaming on Showtime and is available to rent on Amazon.

Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

If we were to attempt to pinpoint one film that heralded the horror renaissance we seem to be experiencing today, then we would likely give that honor to Get Out. Jordan Peele has a long history of poking fun at Black representation in horror; two Key and Peele sketches that land right on topic are one in which racist zombies refuse to eat Black people and another in which two self-proclaimed “magical negroes” do supernatural battle over the right to cheer up a sad white guy. The initial premise of Get Out seems like a comedy/sci-fi/horror parody of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but this wildly pulpy premise smuggles in a centuries-spanning backstory of colonization and slavery that we must take the time to look for (and for which Peele rewards us when we do). Get Out is, first and foremost, a story about racism as horror—slavery and psychological colonization, the liberal rhetoric of color-blindness, the disposability of Black life, and the white savior trope practically assault us as Peele forces us to watch the entire process of settler colonialism play out upon the body of one man. W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness[11] becomes literalized in the Sunken Place. The heart of Get Out lies in Chris’s experience of being observed, the manner in which he is observed, and his transformation into an object of fetishistic desire.

Get Out is available to stream on FuboTV and to rent on Amazon.

Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby, 2020)

While Jordan Peele was quickly catapulting to auteur status as the voice of Black horror, Mi’kmaq director Jeff Barnaby was quietly doing the same in the background for indigenous horror. He began his career winning all kinds of fancy awards for his short films From Cherry English (2004), The Colony (2007), and File Under Miscellaneous (2010). However, Barnaby began pulling a Peele, as it were, with his 2013 debut feature film Rhymes for Young Ghouls (see Also of Interest below), a horror-drama-revenge tragedy that takes on the horrifically abusive Indian residential school system with more than a few nods to Romero and his ghouls-not-zombies. Throughout his corpus, Barnaby interweaves body horror worthy of Argento with the daily material realities of indigenous communities. For the Mi’kmaq individuals in Blood Quantum, who are mysteriously immune from the bloodborne zombie virus that has decimated white society, this latest apocalypse is merely one of many apocalypses that has been brought upon them, and which they have survived. The title itself refers to U.S. laws that establish legally defined racial population groups, a tactic which simultaneously branded “full-blood” Native Americans and legally erase those individuals who lacked sufficient documented indigenous lineage. Here, Barnaby unleashes blood quantum—that which both saves the Mi’kmaq from infection and which makes them immediately recognizable as “Indian”—as a literal terror, with all the blood, gore, and sadism of the colonial structures that produced it.

Blood Quantum is streaming on Shudder.

The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)

We can boil down the late-1990s and its strange blend of national comfort and ominous foreboding into a single cinematic image—that of the top half of Heather Donahue’s head, complete with pale blue knit hap, with tears and snot running down her face as she desperately apologizes to her parents for leading her two-man film crew into the wilderness and promptly getting irretrievably lost. Much of the critical conversation around The Blair Witch Project—whose budget makes Romero’s production costs look downright lavish—focuses on the movie’s unique filming strategies and use of “found footage.” Less explored, however, is the lengths to which Myrick and Sánchez, along with their slapped-together cast, are willing to go to make the wilderness itself a source of terror. Blair Witch takes an almost cosmic approach to the Burkittsville forest, converting the uninhabited space from simply a life-size version of Heather’s precious map into an unending hellscape of absolute nothingness. So reliant have Heather and her crew become on the extent to which the country has been “settled” that colonization becomes a source of comfort; to support her argument that the woods aren’t big enough to get lost in, Heather shouts, “Because this is America! We’ve exhausted all of our natural resources!” And yet here they are, and here we are, lost in the woods that, by settler logic, shouldn’t be there—scared to close our eyes, and scared to open them.

You can rent The Blair Witch Project on Amazon.

Annihilation (Alex Garland, 2018)

The preeminent maxim of settler colonialism is that it is a structure, not an event. This pithy little phrase essentially communicates that settler colonialism, more than other purely economic or military forms of occupation, comes to new land to stay, and in staying must continually reinforce itself. If we think that colonization is something that happened back in the days of the Puritans and that ended along with the American Revolution, then let’s consider for a minute that the reservation system very much persists, that the industrial prison system has replaced the plantation system for subduing Black activism, and that on March 27, 2020, the Trump administration rescinded the federal government’s tribal designation for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe (you know, the ones who gave us Thanksgiving) for essentially no reason at all.[12] But while settler colonialism is fundamentally a racial structure, as many of the films listed above have explored, it is also a capitalist one, and capitalism depends at its core on the maximum extraction of natural resources. Damien Short has described the global economy as following an “ecocidal pattern of a genocidal machine,”[13] and a new rash of eco-horror movies capture the widespread devastation and many terrifying ramifications of centuries of environmental disregard. While we could trace this trend back to 1985 with The Quiet Earth or this year with Gaia, Alex Garland’s Annihilation most directly connects our utter inability to contend with climate change with the extractive practices of colonialism. If multiculturalism is the celebrated “plus” of colonization to contemporary moderate liberals—as if that multiculturalism was achieved in a Marlo Thomas after-school special—then the diverse military recruits who venture into the quarantined zone where a mysterious meteorite crashed are no match whatsoever for the utter weirdness of The Shimmer. And this should paralyze us. Because these men and women of science are prepared—they are highly capable, über-intelligent, and equipped with all of the resources of the United States military. The Earth is finally fighting back against the devastation that we have wrought against it for generations, and it is not messing around.

Annihilation is streaming on Paramount + and is available to rent on Amazon.

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (Jonathan Cuartas, 2020)

If zombies (again, thanks, Romero) aren’t quite your undead cup of tea, at least there is no shortage of vampire movies to satisfy your every immortal-being need. While the vampire’s origins are a little more difficult to pin down than those of the zombie, vampiric or blood-craving entities have been recorded in cultures all across the world. Perhaps the predominant characteristic of the vampire in most of its incarnations—from the obvious Dracula to Lilith to Lestat to the obviously demonic “angel” in Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass—is that they are sexy. Their dependence on human blood makes them precarious and liminal subjects, simultaneously powerful and frail. But while some of cinema’s famous vampires may look a little pasty when it’s been a while since their last plasma fix, few film vampires are portrayed as legitimately sick. Jonathan Cuartas’s My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To continues in the vein of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In to explore the realities both of living with vampirism specifically as an illness and of caring for a loved one who suffers from a disease that renders them, according to common sensibilities, monstrous. A number of recent horror films have focused on the more ghastly aspects of care—The Babadook and Relic, to name two examples—but Cuartas’s tale of two siblings who work multiple jobs and routinely murder homeless people to provide blood for their deathly ill vampire brother engages in a particularly disquieting form of “unsettling.” The process of unsettling requires that we unlearn national myths and narratives that ignore colonialism or portray it as peaceful or benevolent. This “unlearning” asks us to look for subjugated knowledges and alternative narratives from voices that colonial governments and communities ignore, silence, or appropriate. Western ideas of sexuality and the family served as weapons of colonization, and Cuartas unpacks the insidious nature of normalized colonial family structures that treats one person’s life as worth preserving over another’s. As such, he centralizes an anti-colonial praxis of care that destabilizes the colonial family as the sole form of kinship by revealing, in all its blood-soaked glory, the violence upon which the family depends.

My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To is streaming on Amazon Prime and on Shudder.

Also of Interest

            The Trope of the Ancient Indian Burial Ground

                    The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979)

Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)

Pet Sematary (Mary Lambert, 1989)

It Chapter Two (Andrés Muschietti, 2019)

   Slavery and Its Modern Incarnations

Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)

Candyman (Nia DaCosta, 2021)

Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

   Savages, Savages—Representations of Indigeneity in Contemporary Horror

The Wind (Emma Tammi, 2018)

Rhymes for Young Ghouls (Jeff Barnaby, 2013)

Bone Tomahawk (S. Craig Zahler, 2015)

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Notes

[1] Patrick Wolfe’s 2006 article “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” in the Journal of Genocide Research has been instrumental in defining the variety of means by which settler colonialism is enacted.

[2] See Lorenzo Veracini’s Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010) for a comprehensive history of the political tactics of settler colonialism in the United States.

[3] See indigenous scholar/activist Ward Churchill’s 2004 book Kill the Indian: Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools.

[4] See Chapter 5, “Enslaved Labor and Strategies of Subjugation,” in Natsu Taylor Saito’s Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law.

[5] Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting” provides an alphabetical catalogue of the relationship between the horror genre and settler colonialism.

[6] Gordon 22.

[7] Blakemore’s original article for The Washington Post can be found here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1987/07/12/kubricks-shining-secret/a7e3433d-e92e-4171-b46f-77817f1743f0/.

[8] See Steve Bogira’s original coverage of Ruthie Mae McCoy’s murder and the city’s horrific neglect of its public housing residents here: https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/they-came-in-through-the-bathroom-mirror/. His 2014 article about the clear connections between his story and Candyman is also worth a read: https://chicagoreader.com/blogs/how-a-story-about-the-horrors-of-housing-projects-became-part-of-a-horror-movie/.

[9] Wolfe 387.

[10] Kim TallBear’s “Making Love and Relations: Beyond Settler Sexualities” (2018), Maria Lugones’s “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (2007), and Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire (1995) are excellent resources on settler sexuality and the colonial education of desire.

[11] See The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

[12] See “Trump administration revokes tribe’s reservation status in ‘power grab’” at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/trump-administration-revokes-mashpee-wampanoag-tribe-reservation-status.

[13] Short 193.

Bibliography

Blakemore, Bill. “Kubrick’s Shining Secret.” The Washington Post, 12 July 1987, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/style/1987/07/12/kubricks-shining-secret/a7e3433d-e92e-4171-b46f-77817f1743f0/. Accessed 27 December 2021.

Bogira, Steve. “How a story about the horrors of housing projects became part of a horror movie.” Chicago Reader, 14 March 2014, https://chicagoreader.com/blogs/how-a-story-about-the-horrors-of-housing-projects-became-part-of-a-horror-movie/. Accessed 27 December 2021.

Bogira, Steve. “They Came in Through the Bathroom: A Murder in the Projects.” Chicago Reader, 3 September 1987, https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/they-came-in-through-the-bathroom-mirror/. Accessed 27 December 2021.

Churchill, Ward. Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurb & Co., 1903.

Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Guardian Staff and Agency. “Trump administration revokes tribe’s reservation status in ‘power grab.’” The Guardian, 31 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/31/trump-administration-revokes-mashpee-wampanoag-tribe-reservation-status. Accessed 28 December 2021.

Lugones, Maria. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007, pp. 186-209.

Saito, Natsu Taylor. Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law. New York City: NYU Press, 2020.

Short, Damien. Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death, and Ecocide. London: Zed Books, 2016.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

TallBear, Kim. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sexualities.” In Making Kin, Not Population, edited by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.

Tuck, Eve and C. Ree. “A Glossary of Haunting.” In Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, Left Coast Press, 2013, pp. 639-658.

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006.

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Emily Naser-Hall is a fifth-year Ph.D candidate in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. She earned a BA from Tulane University, a Juris Doctor from DePaul College of Law, an LL.M. in National Security Law from Georgetown, and an MA in Literature from Northwestern University. Her research interests include post-1945 American literature, gothic narratives, and the intersection of law and literature. Her work has been published in the Tulane Journal of International Law, the DePaul Journal for Social Justice, and the Proceedings of the Third Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference. Her upcoming publications will be included in Studies in the American Short Story, Popular Culture Studies Journal and the anthology Screening #MeToo: Rape Culture in Hollywood.