Ah, Native American slashers: a sub-sub-genre so microscopic it might be considered apocryphal if not for the celluloid fossils that prove its ephemeral existence. Nestled awkwardly between the tail-end of disco and the rise of Reaganomics, this narrow cultural corridor birthed films like Fleshburn (1984), Ghost Dance (1983), and Scalps (1983)—low-budget horrors where Indigenous identity was often reduced to a weaponized specter, a sort of mythological boogeyman fueled by half-remembered anthropology and full-throated cinematic recklessness.
Let’s not mince machetes: these films are less anthropological documents than they are haunted house mirrors—warped, cracked, and reflecting more about the filmmakers’ anxieties than about Native American cosmology. Take Fleshburn, for instance. The premise: a Navajo ex-military man and escaped mental patient exacts revenge on his white psychiatrist captors, who, naturally, have no spiritual defense against his nature-bound vengeance. It's as if Rambo were rewritten by a peyote-tripping Carl Jung and directed by someone who thought “cultural nuance” was a brand of cigarette.
Then there’s Ghost Dance, which dared to name-drop the actual Indigenous religious movement—a spiritual tradition grounded in nonviolence and unity—and transmute it into a supernatural revenge fantasy. Imagine if a film titled Sermon on the Mount featured Jesus as a slasher villain wielding a cross-shaped chainsaw. That’s the level of theological and cultural gymnastics we're witnessing here. And yet, in its clumsy metaphysics and polyester gore, Ghost Dance seems to ask—without knowing it—what happens when a culture’s spirits are resurrected, not to heal, but to haunt the nation that tried to erase them.
Scalps, perhaps the most infamous of the triad, is exploitation cinema at its most adolescent. It’s got it all: desecrated burial grounds, ancient curses, and a tone that suggests its creators skimmed one paragraph about Native Americans in a high school textbook and said, “That’s enough research.” And yet, there’s a peculiar energy in its earnest awfulness, as if the film knows it's violating taboos but can’t quite articulate which ones, or why they matter.
What unites these films—aside from questionable acting and a production budget rivaling that of a bake sale—is their accidental meditation on settler guilt. The Native antagonist is rarely a mere killer; he is wrath incarnate, history’s blade unsheathed, the past roaring back into a polyester present. These slashers don’t understand the stories they’re telling, but they feel that some ancient wrong is demanding redress. And so they mask it in rubbery gore and cheap mysticism, like children playing dress-up in their ancestors’ trauma.
There’s something almost Henry Miller-esque here—not in the licentious content, but in the cosmological undertone. These films posit a universe in which spiritual laws, long ignored, suddenly reassert themselves with primal ferocity. A cosmic correction via scalp and spirit. The genre doesn’t quite pull it off, of course. But it gestures toward that terrifying possibility: that the American horror story didn’t start with Jason or Freddy—but with Plymouth Rock, with Wounded Knee, with a land soaked in unacknowledged blood.
So, let us regard these films not as horror, exactly, nor even history—but as fever dreams of a culture trying, failing, and trying again to reckon with what it buried. The bodies, after all, don’t stay buried. Not in slashers. And not in America.
https://americanindian.si.edu/
No comments:
Post a Comment