'I'm indigenizing zombies': behind gory First Nation horror Blood Quantum
The Restigouche River snakes through the Canadian wilds just north of the border with Maine, its name derived from the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation people who have called the area home for centuries. In 1780, their settlement played a pivotal role in the French and Indian war, when the Acadian and Mi’kmaq armies took refuge there after retreating from the British ships upstream. At the time, the French dubbed the newly established battery “Pointe de la Mission”; they named the other one that they had set up across the river “Pointe aux Sauvages”.
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This would not be the last time the white settler population would visit violent crisis upon the Restigouche. The Quebec provincial police conducted a pair of brutal raids on the small community over two days in June 1981, citing overfishing by the local population. Injustices were carried out and later formally apologized for, but this time around, the Mi’kmaq would have a hand in formulating the record. The Native film-maker Alanis Obomsawin captured the second raid on camera and relayed her perspective with the documentary Incident at Restigouche. For a young Listuguj boy named Jeff Barnaby, witnessing the cruel might of the Canadian government along with the rejoinder from a First Nations artist would effectively determine the course of his life from then onward. That, and getting into George Romero.
“The Quebec government deciding to raid my little reserve, the approximate size of which was two thousand people at the time, in this really disproportionate response,” the now-adult Barnaby tells the Guardian from his home in Canada. “That shaped my perception in a couple ways: first by showing me that film could be used as a safe form of social protest … You hear Native people talking about learning self-perception through Hollywood depictions, but I was growing up watching real Mi’kmaq men and women onscreen, because of Alanis’ film. For the past 20 years, she was the only Native film-maker that I had to look up to and build my ideas around. Around this time, I was also watching a lot of horror films, and my brother had brought home a Beta copy of Night of the Living Dead. That was all I needed.”
Synthesizing these two influences – the zombie flicks that captured his imagination and the cultural turbulence that molded his reality – has yielded Barnaby’s new film Blood Quantum, a crucial and wholly original entry into the canon of First Nation cinema. The horror-thriller, a mainstay of festival Midnight Madness sections over the six months since its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, arrives online this week via the niche streaming service Shudder. The genre-focused library will provide a fitting platform for Barnaby’s vision of an undead invasion exacerbating the tensions between white Canadians and their indigenous neighbors. It’s an exceptionally gnarly specimen of the zombie picture, but moreover, the film articulates a viewpoint largely unexplored in the world of scary movies. “You’re starting to see Native cinema take shape,” Barnaby says, “as a genre and across genres.”
His film places a familiar premise – lurching ghouls hungry for brains descend upon a small town, forcing its denizens to take up arms and mount a counteroffensive – in a fresh context that informs and enriches the genre’s ageing bag of tricks. The concerned conversations that always fill out the first act of movies like this graft the usual pseudoscientific speculation to superstitions passed down through Native tradition. We later learn that the infectious germ cannot be transmitted to anyone with First Nation blood, even a drop, lending the film its central dramatic thread as well as its title. (For years, “blood quantum” laws restricted rights based on fractions of identity passed through interracial parentage.)
One of the survivors is a teenage mother-to-be (Olivia Scriven), pregnant with a Mi’kmaq boy’s child. She’s one of many white refugees hoping to find safety in a First Nation-run sanctuary, a bracing reversal of the area’s usual power balance. As one of a small number of First Nation film-makers with public reach, Barnaby cannot help but be implicated in conversations much bigger than himself. The dynamics of his script invite questions about cross-cultural resentment, opposition and solidarity; one shot invokes the famed Face to Face photograph depicting a Canadian soldier staring down a Mohawk warrior during the 1990 Oka Crisis standoff. All the same, he tries not to get too bogged down in the politics of real life.
“At no point, as an Indigenous creator, do I want my audience to think that what they’re looking at is an accurate representation of Native life,” he firmly states. “It has Native language and Native actors, but this is the creative interpretation of a popular cinematic trope, in this case zombies. I’m indigenizing zombies. But I’m not trying to make any particular statement about the accuracy. It’d be like showing Mark Wahlberg onscreen and saying he speaks for the Irish. I don’t think I should be carrying that weight! I don’t speak for Native cinema; I speak for Jeff Barnaby, a res rat that grew up watching Obomsawin films. If I drift into any authenticity while being me, that’s great, but by that same token, everyone needs to realize that what they’re watching is Native fiction. It’s a fusion.”
Barnaby takes glee in juxtaposition, mashing up disparate elements and situating his art at the collision point. That goes not just for his narrative grafting of walking-dead terror to his Mi’kmaq milieu, but for his anything-goes style. He empties the aesthetic toolbox, from split-screen to splashes of lurid color to manipulations through fast- and slow-motion. He takes special pride in the expressionistic animated interludes that break up the film, leaving the larger-than-life impression of a bone-crunching comic book. He spared no expense at replicating that adrenalized feel for the live-action scenes, such as the gloriously gory set piece that involves a bridge, a steady stream of the walking dead channeled on to it, and a barricade of giant snowblowers mulching them into viscera soup. “Getting on an interprovincial bridge for three days was a minor miracle and cost us a small fortune,” Barnaby says.
But that scene was crucial to establishing the tone, placing it in a register well removed from anything resembling social realism. “I wanted no explicit morality – just a redneck story of a teenage pregnancy, something relatable, with no effort to solve the racism it shows.” Barnaby makes a crack about bogus racial dynamics in the 2005 film Crash before concluding, “In the strictest sense of the term, I wanted it to be a Native exploitation film.
He amplifies the actual Native struggles of resource scarcity and friction with Canadian officials to heroically outsized proportions, shrugging off the “thinly veiled” allegories used in the past to sanitize and distort First Nations heritage. “We face a culture that doesn’t prioritize Native stories, unless you’ve got a white person to tell it,” he says. “You need a Kevin Costner to hold your hand, or you have to stage the whole fucking thing in space with blue space-cats. I didn’t feel like I needed to hide the First Nations part in something else.”
Barnaby is more than a representative but less than a standard-bearer, a person who wants to sculpt the dialogue about public perception of Native people without dominating it. In short, he’d like to be one of many voices contributing to a rich and varied body of art, a full-scale paradigm change he sees as entirely possible. “Look, there’s still a football team called the Edmonton Eskimos,” he concedes. “But we have a stronger cinematic presence, the most prominent Indigenous film center next to New Zealand. We have so many great film-makers coming out of Canada, both fiction and documentary, so my hope is it’s only going to be a matter of time until this – for lack of a better word – renaissance spreads wider over culture in Canada.”
Until that day comes, he’s just going to keep making his movies his way, with one eye to the currents of history and the other to the B-movie grindhouse. In fact, he sees these as inextricably linked, braided along the Restigouche. For Barnaby and the others raised along its banks, the sensational and the sobering have always uneasily coexisted. “Apocalypse films speak to a deep-seated desire to see the powers that be topple,” he says. “We’re starting to see rumblings of this everywhere. We’ve all just fucking had it with late-stage capitalism. You’re starting to see permutations of these ideas manifest themselves in all these dystopian apocalypse films. I don’t think the people making the movies are even aware of this, but the proletariat’s getting ready to riot. What I am doing here isn’t even prescient, because it’s a pulse that was already in the culture. It’s always been in the culture.”
Blood Quantum is now available on Shudder
