Even the most ardent fans have a complex relationship with horror. The genre often deals in difficult subject matter, particularly the lived experiences of marginalized and traumatized characters, and opens up darker, and at times dehumanizing, experiences to audiences in a way that increases empathy. Laura Hall further complicates the audience’s relationship with horror by examining the genre’s place in the ongoing legacy of white-settler colonialism.

In an impressively sweeping survey of major North American horror films, the Ottawa-based academic explores how settler-colonial appropriations, replacements, and erasures of Indigenous culture are not only present in most horror films, but function as the core premise of most horror tropes. Her work is impeccably timed, as horror is on a definite cultural upswing.

In Hall’s reading, the well-established figure of the Final Girl, first coined by Carol Clover, is coded as an Indigenous figure, or more precisely the white settler–colonial idea of one. In the standard slasher arc, the Final Girl witnesses the decimation of her friends and loved ones but manages to evade the monster/killer by hiding in the wilderness, changing her clothes, taking up improvised weapons, and eventually succumbing to a “primal” violence that allows her to finally destroy the killer. In settler-colonial cultural constructs, the idea of “savagery” is tied to the Indigenous culture that was brutally suppressed in order to make space for colonial settlements. While the Final Girl finally using violence against the monster can certainly be cathartic, Hall argues that rather than being subversive, most horror films strictly reinforce the white settler–colonial status quo by using this violent element to restore the supposed picturesque innocence of white colonial life.

Most of the films Hall examines do not prominently feature Indigenous characters or stories, but she sees that lack as directly connected to the settler-colonial narrative. Hall writes, “North American horror portrays Indigenous Peoples and lands as disappeared and frozen in the past, but the Indian as savage, as freeing even, is hyper-visible. Who, and where, are Indigenous people in horror? The answer: everywhere and nowhere at once. Both disappeared but also obsessed over, the imagined Indian is projected to reinforce settler colonialism.”

While she touches on a large array of horror films, Hall’s analysis is largely focused on the slasher sub-genre and within that genre she looks closely at a few classic franchises: Scream, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The other main branch of horror that Hall examines is the overused trope of the “Indian Burial Ground,” which doesn’t typically feature in the slasher genre, but is much more present in haunted house films. Her analysis of such key films as The Shining and Pet Sematary are compelling and utterly convincing, but Hall tackles so many films so quickly, in ever briefer summaries, that the focus of her argument becomes dissipated.

Hall is clearly a fan of the genre, and so these are not simply takedowns of films that should be denigrated or treated as inferior because of their colonial underpinnings. Instead, her analyses are nuanced and try to tackle the difficult intersection of enjoying these films with the awareness of the cultural erasure and the justifications for colonial acts of genocide that lie at the core of the genre. She ends with a hopeful note of how Indigenous artists and storytellers might answer this colonial message, and she says that “Indigenous people are speaking back to horror in creative and innovative ways, even as I type these last words.”