Why horror is a good genre for Indigenous storytelling

Horror fiction provides a unique literary space for Indigenous authors to express their cultural heritage, challenge stereotypes, and engage with the genre in innovative ways, said Indigenous author and editor Shane Hawk.

By weaving together horror elements and indigenous storytelling, these works offer readers a fresh and thought-provoking exploration of fear, identity, and the supernatural.

“We’ve been storytellers for thousands of years,” said Hawk, the editor of Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology.

“We’re naturals, specifically in the horror realm. Our ancestors had lived through real life horrors. And so we kind of have this dark cloud over us and we’re persevering, we’re resilient, we’re getting through it,” he told The Sunday Magazine.

Hawk is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, and has been writing horror fiction for the last five years. 

The title of the anthology comes from the shared belief among many Indigenous cultures that whistling at night could have terrible consequences, whether it invokes a supernatural monster or other violence. The consequence varies among different cultures, Hawk explained.

New Indigenous horror studies program

Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., this year launched a program exploring it both as a literary and cinematic genre. Managed by the university’s Decolonial Reading Circle, it will offer a year-long exploration of the genres.

“I grew up watching and reading dominant horror narratives where Indigenous peoples are the savage killers or are responsible for the hauntings of white people,” said Robyn Bourgeois, vice provost of Indigenous Engagement at Brock.

“I love that Indigenous people have taken up this genre and are not only telling stories that reflect our ways of knowing and being but also disrupting dominant horror tropes.”

Never Whistle at Night features 26 short stories, all by First Nation writers. Sudbury, Ont., writer Waubgeshig Rice contributed the story Limbs, which concludes Never Whistle at Night.

“I remember being a little kid and hearing Wendigo stories and being really scared,” Rice said of the Indigenous myth of a monster that possesses humans, turning them into cannibals. 

“Those stories are meant to inform us and I think make us aware of the dangers out in the world.”

WATCH | The trailer for Tales From The Rez, a Blackfoot horror-comedy series:

Rice said he wanted Limbs to show some of the negative health outcomes from colonialism, but flipped around.

“I wanted to set it in a more historical setting of this Anishinaabe guide, helping a settler through the lands, a prospector looking for resources, and then sort of illustrate that exploitative relationship that settlers and indigenous people have had,” he said.

“In some ways what happens to him is representative of disease, you know, diabetes and all the other sort of negative health outcomes that have resulted from being displaced, being colonized and so on.”

By weaving together horror elements and indigenous storytelling, these works offer readers a fresh and thought-provoking exploration of fear, identity, and the supernatural.

Hawk says it’s important that readers still enjoy the stories for their entertainment value.

“I want to make it clear that as Indigenous writers, we don’t always have to educate the audience or include folklore. There’s this kind of assumption [among] mostly Western audiences that once you delve into an Indigenous piece, that ‘Oh, there has to be some lesson in it from their culture,'” he said.

“We just want to put that message out there that we’re not monolithic and we’re not here to preach. Through our stories, we can take a really interesting and dark, serious, deep look into our shared histories, overlapping histories.”