Horror and Indigeneity

Literature, Film, and Television

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Edited by Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes

Type

Studies

Subject

Genre > Horror

Keywords

horror, national cultures

Publishing date

2026 (July 14, 2026)

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 296 pages
7 x 10 inches (18 x 25.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4773-3413-3

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Book Presentation:
A collection of essays about Indigeneity and horror in cinema, literature, and beyond.

How did Indigeneity come to be horrifying? Think of the “Indian burial ground” trope, a staple of 1970s horror cinema, not to mention decades of Western films and fictions that made “savage Indians” the face of fear in popular culture. Can horror do something else in the hands of Indigenous people? Creators such as Eden Robinson and Jeff Barnaby have self-consciously turned to horror to tell new kinds of stories, stories that question who is a monster and what constitutes the monstrous.

Horror and Indigeneity explores representations of Indigenous people in settler horror texts and in the growing corpus of horror by Indigenous writers and filmmakers. Widely spanning time periods and media, the contributors to this edited volume address themes such as cannibalism, eco-horror, historical trauma, and contemporary antiracism as they relate to classical horror cinema and recent works such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Lovecraft Country, and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Also featuring interviews with Jones and director T. J. Cuthand, Horror and Indigeneity rethinks the terror of the Other in potent and provocactive terms.

About the authors:
Murray Leeder is an assistant lecturer in film and English at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction and The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema.Gary D. Rhodes is a professor of media production at Oklahoma Baptist University, a filmmaker, and a poet. He is the author of Vampires in Silent Cinema and coeditor of Film by Design: The Art of the Movie Poster.

Press Reviews:
Horror and Indigeneity is a must-read for scholars, students, filmmakers, and horror fans everywhere. It makes a major contribution to the fast-growing field of Indigenous horror studies while providing context and meaning for authors, producers, practitioners, and audiences alike. Through fifteen fascinating chapters, this book explores the spectrum of Indigenous representation across time and genres, first unpacking the history of the tropes of the "uncivilized Native," the "Indian burial ground," and "the merciless Savage" as they have played out in literature, film, and television over more than a century, before delving into the trajectory of Indigenous counternarratives of colonialism-as-monster. Through interviews and chapters exploring the slashers, dramas, documentaries, mysteries, and thrillers that have featured spirits, mutants, zombies, windigos, ghosts, and other fearsome figures, this book unsettles the horror genre and answers the question: Who are the real savages we should fear?
-- Heather Igloliorte, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada

This ambitious edited volume makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies and fills a gap in the scholarly study of horror films, novels, and television shows from the perspectives of other disciplines aligned with Indigenous studies. The coeditors pull all the threads together, and the accessibility of different chapters will make them useful in both undergraduate and graduate studies courses.
-- Cailín E. Murray, editor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History

Horror and Indigeneity is a significant contribution to horror studies, representing an important early step in introducing decolonial perspectives into the study of horror and providing a foundation upon which future scholars can build. As editors, Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes do an excellent job framing the volume and establishing the need for it. The scope of the volume will make it an important scholarly resource that will undoubtedly appear on the shelves of many horror scholars.
-- Kendall R. Phillips, author of A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema

See the publisher website: University of Texas Press