Beyond the Burial Ground

This time of year, we’re all looking for a good Halloween scare. Although we can always rely on writers from Stephen King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, Paul Tremblay, and Tananarive Due to deliver us a generous helping of chills and thrills, have you ever thought that the most terrifying monsters might just be the ones that lurk in the shadows of colonial history?

For as long as I can remember, references to native/indigenous cultures in horror have been dominated by the stale image of the ‘Indian burial ground’ and the wandering ghosts that attend. These familiar tropes have served a function similar to the dreaded and savage ‘Indian raiding party’ of classic Westerns, which reduced indigenous culture to a monstrous horde out to terrorize and attack unsuspecting settlers.

While the elimination of such images from popular culture is long past due, a growing group of native/indigenous writers from across North America to Australia are reclaiming their own stories and creating a renaissance of indigenous horror in the process. The storytellers at the center of this movement grew up knowing the real monsters and have made great strides over the last decade in breaking through the persistent cultural barriers to publication allowing them to share their works with the wider reading public.

Offering fresh perspectives on the nature of horror informed by indigenous perspectives, writers such as Stephen Graham Jones, Andrea L. Rogers, Cherie Dimaline, and Claire G. Coleman, along with others included in Shane Hawk’s (Anoka: A Collection of Indigenous Horror) and Theodore Van Alst Jr’s (Pour One For the Devil) collection, Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology have been very busy painting, in Jones’s words, “the shelves red.”

Across the works of these writers, who are also currently featured in a university class I’m teaching on indigenous futurisms through the lens of horror, the specters of invading extraterrestrials, vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, and human monsters are artfully rendered to drive narratives of contemporary indigenous life within the context of what Anishinaabe storier, Gerald Vizenor—author of the first major work of indigenous futurisms with Bearheart—calls, cultural survivance.

These and other works reveal that horror’s true power lies in its capacity to expose and confront the real-world ghouls of colonial oppression, and the Halloween season is an ideal time to take up these vital stories. The growing influence and popularity of this movement is illustrated by current two-year run of the first-of-its-kind indigenous horror anthology, Never Whistle at Night, on the indie bestseller list. It’s a feat that comes hot on the heels of the release of Stephen Graham Jones’s sequel to his award-winning love letter to horror in My Heart is a Chainsaw, which introduced the world to his crossblood, Blackfeet final girl extraordinaire in Jennifer “Jade” Daniels.

As the most prolific writer behind the current explosion of native horror, now with almost 30 novels to his credit, Jones has been writing horror since the late 90s. He made his first major contributions to the genre with a pair of spine-tingling novels in All the Beautiful Sinners and Demon Theory published in the early 2000s.

As brilliant as All the Beautiful Sinners is in its reimagining of the psychological horror blending the crime and mystery genres in the mold of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, what makes it truly stand out is the presence of a native deputy named Jim Doe caught up in a grotesque twist recalling The Wizard of Oz’s yellow brick road. Jones ratcheted the horror even higher in his subsequent three-part novelization of a horror film trilogy in Demon Theory.

Using a playful cinematic frame, Jones stretched the boundaries of horror by conjuring three distinct monster tropes in a self-aware narrative that carried readers into a series of alternate and overlapping worlds set in a forsaken farmhouse steeped in cosmic horror and stalked by demons, slashers, and the transgressions of the past.

Starting around 2010, Jones cast off the pressure of expectations and re-dedicated his focus almost exclusively to his first literary love of horror. Since then, he has gone on to produce almost twenty horror novels and hundreds macabre stories featuring an exceptionally wide range of monsters taking place on similarly varied sites of terror and dread.

A sampling of his prolific output from this period is highlighted in narratives kicked off by an account of a smuggler-turned-rabbit-headed chupacabra ranging the southern borderlands of Texas in It Came from Del Rio and the sheer bedlam of a steel-caged clash between a group of homemakers taking part in a baking competition and a slate of semi-professional wrestlers in the madcap horror-comedy Zombie Bake-Off.

These were followed by a zombie-infused love story in The Gospel of Z and a coming-of-age tale of a family of nomadic werewolves in his breakout novel, Mongrels, which Adam Cesare praised as “among one of the best ever written." It's narrated from the first-person perspective of a young boy who spends his time wondering when he is going to “wolf-out” and join the pack, all while living a precarious life akin to the rough and tumble vampires of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark.

Returning in 2020 to his favorite of all horror subgenres in the slasher as a follow-up to his 2012 indie novel, Last Final Girl, Jones gave readers a wildly imaginative take on the Friday the 13th story of maternal vengeance through The Only Good Indians. In this story, however, which also transports readers to the Blackfeet Reservation of Montana, instead of Pamela Voorhees we get a gripping story of loss and cultural violation featuring an elk-headed slasher returned to settle dues and rebalance the world.

With such a diverse array of terrifying stories to his credit, along with the recently concluded ‘Indian Lake Trilogy’ featuring Jade Daniels, who begs the question, “has there ever even been an Indian in a slasher?” Jones answered her call in a riveting way. It is powered by an uncommon capacity to tap into the zeitgeist of 80s horror accompanied by classic hair metal soundtrack, while adapting classic tropes through a procession of human and otherworldly monsters that are both uncanny and chillingly familiar.

[Film companion: Nyla Innuksuk’s Slash/Back is a joyful, empowering, and subversive film featuring a cast of strong Inuit young women who combine traditional knowledge and pop-culture savvy (what Jones refers to as Slasher Q) to defeat a monstrous threat.]

The Summer of 2025 brought, perhaps, Jones boldest novel to date in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Centering on the 1870 Marias River Massacre and the barbarity of buffalo extermination resulting from Manifest Destiny, in this story Jones traces the exploits of a Blackfeet vampire named Good Stab who puts up a desperate fight to alter the course of history. Distinguished by a spot on President Obama’s favorite summer reads, this tale of a vampire is much more than a story of violence and trauma, loss and vengeance, but one in which the true “monsters” of the American past are revealed as the agents of injustice, greed, deception, and historical erasure.

Inspired by H.G. Wells’ terrifying story of extra-terrestrial invasion, Noongar-Australian writer Claire G. Coleman gave readers an astonishingly original take on this overworked theme through her debut 2017 novel, Terra Nullius. Drawing on sci-fi as a compelling narrative source, Coleman gives us a renegade character named Esperance who proves to be a new kind of final girl in the way Sigourney Weaver portrayed Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise.

In adapting this template to reflect on the horror of Australia’s “Stolen Generations,” readers will also find resonances that recall the work of other Australian indigenous writers such as Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, as well as native North American writers N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko.

Coleman’s supple world-building gives cover to her brilliant use of misdirection and foreshadowing to produce a transcendent story of indigenous and human resilience against invading “monsters” arrived from another galaxy. Starting like a conventional historical novel on the brutal invasion and colonization of Australia and the forced assimilation perpetrated against the Stolen Generations of aboriginal children, Coleman soon reveals the real monsters to be visitors from another world. The true horror that Coleman exposes is the realization that, from an indigenous perspective, the process of colonization encapsulated both an alien invasion and apocalypse.

Veteran First Nation, Georgian Bay Métis novelist, Cherie Dimaline, made her own contribution to post-apocalyptic horror in her own 2017 speculative YA novel of apocalypse and survivance set off by environmental devastation in The Marrow Thieves. Given Dimaline’s deft handling of divisive social politics and the urgent environmental issues of global warming and pollution, hers is a story of catastrophe and survivance that seems terrifyingly close and all-too-possible.

The real genius of Dimaline’s novel, however, lies in her reframing of body horror as a metaphor for cultural and spiritual theft. In the dystopian Canada (and world) of her novel’s near future, government “recruiters” literally hunt down indigenous people to “harvest” their bone marrow as it is believed to hold the regenerative power of dreams.

It’s a direct allegory for the horrors visited upon First Nations people through the genocidal legacy of the residential schools, a system of religious institutions that abetted the massive theft of land and the destructive extraction of natural resources it facilitated. Yet, as her ragtag group of native survivors illustrate, the dreams held by the people are more than the life-affirming substance that nourish the mind but the essential force of humanity’s heart!

[Film companion: Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum propelled by the evocative premise of a zombie apocalypse where indigenous people are immune to the infection. This leaves the reservations as the only safe places, flipping the power dynamic of settler-colonial society, revealing that the horror isn’t just the zombies but the impossible choices the community must make about who to let in and save.]

While the Trail of Tears that resulted from the US federal policy of Indian Removal, as originally conceived by Thomas Jefferson, is seen a defining event in Cherokee culture, Andrea Rogers refuses to let the weight of this historical injustice determine her sense of self and identity. Using this infamous example of hypocrisy and treachery that uprooted her ancestors lives as the triggering event in her linked selection of stories in Man Made Monsters, Rogers unleashes a cast of monsters to explore the depths of generational trauma and strength of family bonds.

Rogers starts with the fateful encounter the displaced family of her main character, Ama Wilson, has with a European vampire while traveling through Texas on their way to an uncertain new home in Indian Territory. That the promise of these treaty lands would be become another bitter betrayal when admitted to the Union as the State of Oklahoma a little more than half a century later, merely serves as another part of novel’s deeper historical context. Namely as a setting that gives birth to a litany of monsters that range from benevolent and protective to terrifying and devouring.

In the wider view, this interconnected story collection weaves the appearance of classic monsters from vampires, ghosts, and werewolves through the history of a single family's lineage, showing how each generation must fight and overcome the ingrained evils of both supernatural and colonial monsters. Tempering this call, a descendant of Alma’s reminds readers of the stakes involved, urging “that instead of recreating the old world, we should be cautious, not accidentally recreate the same problematic one that had destroyed itself.”

For those seeking a more varied and comprehensive sampling that showcases the incredible diversity of perspectives that make up the tapestry of indigenous horror, Never Whistle at Night serves as an essential entry point for any horror fan. This volume offers an array of spine-chilling tales from established native/indigenous writers from across the Americas including Tommy Orange, Rebecca Roanhorse, Richard Van Camp, Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, and Darcie Little Badger.

The wealth of diverse stories included here explore a wide range of themes from body horror and folk creatures to quiet, unsettling stories of evil spirits that range in the night. With a follow-up, second volume currently being planned, it’s the definitive “what to read right now” horror book fans have long been waiting for even if they didn’t know they needed it.

The books and films discussed here are just a sampling of what native and indigenous creators have to offer fans of contemporary horror. So, this Halloween, when you're looking for something that will actually terrify and haunt you—and also make you think—maybe look beyond the usual lineup of Jason, Freddy and Michael (not that there's anything wrong with a comfort-watch of Halloween or Friday the 13th, but the real, uncharted territory—the stuff that truly scares—is where the new, interesting work is being done). Instead, give native and indigenous horror a try.

I think you’ll find the stories from indigenous creators are not just scary or thrilling, but carry messages that are vital and urgent to our planet’s survival. These are stories that, aside from being deliciously entertaining, serve as powerful acts of defiance, reclamation, and survivance.

Let's be honest: putting the ‘Indian burial ground’ trope to rest is long overdue. This Halloween, take a break from the clichés and give some time to the stories being told from the peoples who have always known what the real monsters look like. The ghouls and phantoms that haunt our collective past are real, and it turns out native and indigenous writers have a lot to say about them.