If you grew up anywhere in the continental United States, you were raised in Indian territory.  Or land that was once Indian territory.  That fact wasn’t lost on me as I came of age in New England, where every third town was named for some long forgotten Native American brave or tribe, from Moosup to Attawaugan, from Uncasville to the Quinebaug River.  As a kid, I capered under the towering pines of Mashamoquet State Park and splashed in the icy swells of Misquamacut Beach in Rhode Island.  The mascot of my high school was a Red Indian, with the feather headdress and tomahawk, and our game day chant was “Redmen on the war path/Ooh ahh!”  But did I know any Indians ?  No.  I knew them from the movies, of course: those ripped, red clay colored Adonises in their buckskins and bear claw necklaces, with elemental names like Running Water and John Big Tree.  I just never met any Native Americans personally – I don’t think there any were left in Windham County by the time my family staked a claim there.  As kids, none of us ever wanted to be the Indians in games of Cowboys and–.  It wasn’t prejudice so much as that we didn’t really sabe where Indians were coming from – why they raided covered wagons and besieged forts, why they were loco for firewater and white women, why they favored repetitive chanting over spirited yodeling.  Cowboys dressed cool, in jeans and leather belts with wide-brimmed hats and vests; they had the cool guns, while the Redskins were stuck with crude tools, like arrows and spears and the occasional buck knife.  And Indians talked funny, we thought… kind of like Charlie Chan, dropping their articles and muffing the past tense.  If I’d have known any Original People, I’d have known that the Hollywood Indian was as much of a construct of the film industry as the Mummy or James Bond, but I didn’t and thus helped perpetuate the stereotype.  In penance, my contribution to TCM’s month-long Race & Hollywood: Native American Images on Film festival and the associated Movie Morlock’s blog-a-thon will be to discuss, in four weekly installments, the inclusion of Native American characters in my favorite film genre, the horror movie. 

My willful boyhood ignorance of Native Americans was oddly-timed, given that the late 60s and early to mid 70s were a boom time for Indian characters in film (if not necessarily Native American actors).  Hollywood has long had a custom of parceling out Native American roles to non-Native actors of Latin, African American and even Asian extraction, suggesting that all non-white skin is pretty much the same.  At some point in their long and diverse careers, actors such as Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson, Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, Victor Mature, Boris Karloff, Judith Anderson, Gale Sondergaard, Henry Brandon, Ricardo Montalban, Dolores del Rio, Don Murray, Robert Blake, Edward James Olmos and Elvis Presley all applied the bronze toner of the stereotypical redskin.  Some of these actors at least had some Native blood in them but most didn’t.  It was during the 60s that American Indians got to be the subjects of movies for a change – sometimes even the heroes – but more often than not the story cheated by making the protagonist a half -breed (Elvis in FLAMING STAR, blue-eyed Steve McQueen in NEVADA SMITH) or raised by Indians (Paul Newman in HOMBRE) or by subordinating the Native character to a WASPy leading man (TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE).  Disinclined as Hollywood was to foreground Original People, they loved having them around for color, either as fierce, fearful warriors or pathetic victims.  Exceptions to this rule made for engaging and controversial cinema that often crossed the boundary between frontier adventure and full-on horror.  In Gordan Doulgas’ CHUKA (1967), starving Arapahos descend from the snow-capped mountains to lay siege to a cavalry outpost while the gore quotient and double digit body count point to George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) a year later.  Sam Peckinpah’s MAJOR DUNDEE (1965), Robert Mulligan’s THE STALKING MOON (1969) and Robert Aldrich’s ULZANA’S RAID broached the notion of the Native American as serial killer, focusing on murders committed by renegades for whom fear was as essential a weapon as an arrow or tomahawk.  Michael Pate, the Australian actor who played the ambitiously murderous Sierra Chariba in MAJOR DUNDEE, had starred as the black-clad blood-drinker Drake Robey in Universal-International’s vampire western CURSE OF THE UNDEAD (1959), which solidified for me (at age 10) the connection between American Indians and supernatural entities.  If you went to the movies between 1969 and 1975, horror movies were (with very few exceptions) a lot less frightening than revisionist westerns such as Ralph Nelson’s SOLDIER BLUE, Elliot Silverstein’s A MAN CALLED HORSE and Arthur Penn’s LITTLE BIG MAN (all 1970 – what a year!), whose massacre scenes were fully imagined glimpses into Hell.  On a less graphic but no less disturbing note, I am haunted to this very day by a scene from Jan Troell’s THE NEW LAND (1972), in which a handful of renegade Indians are hanged from an army scaffold during an incongruously gentle prairie snowfall.

The inclusion of Native Americans into actual horror movies boils down to a scattering of reliable formulas…

1.) Whites Trespassing on Sacred Grounds

2.) Vengeful Redskins

3.) Ecology and Racism

… with variations and intermingling of these themes.  American Indians and horror and fantasy films have a longer association than you might expect, going as far back as the Canadian silent THE WEREWOLF (1913).  Directed by Toronto native Henry McRae (who died in Beverly Hills in 1944, after directing the Tim McCoy serial THE INDIANS ARE COMING), the 18-minute film has little to do with the popular perception of werewolves (largely the invention of Hollywood writer/director Curt Siodmak) but concerns itself with aboriginal legends of shapeshifters who transform into actual wolves rather than monsters in pants – a story conceit that has gained currency in pop culture thanks to mega-success of TWILIGHT (2008) and its first sequel NEW MOON (2009).  Because the majority of movies from this time are lost (materials for THE WEREWOLF are thought to have perished in a fire in 1924), it’s difficult to say with certainty whether this was the first movie to blend Native Americans into a horror/fantasy setting but it certainly was among the first.  Moving through the early sound era, ancient Indian curses were standard plot motivators in many B westerns, although invariably evil whites were unmasked in the final act to be spinning the cogs of a dastardly hoax.  It would take Florida filmmaker William Grefe to stand this concept up on its feet with DEATH CURSE OF TARTU (1966).

Ultra low-budget, sluggishly paced and fitfully acted, DEATH CURSE OF TARTU is nonetheless remarkable in a number of ways.  That the Indian curse afflicting an isolated stretch of the Florida Everglades is genuine (Indian prophecies in the main seem to be inspired by the alleged curse visited upon those who violated the tomb of Egyptian boy prince Tutankhamen in 1923)  is interesting in and of itself but the film’s body count consists mostly of teenagers, making this a forerunner of sorts of the trend-setting slashers HALLOWEEN (1978) and FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980).    (It’s also novel for the time that the film’s protagonists, a professor and his wife, are obviously a mixed race couple.)  Although Tartu (an undead, 400 year-old Seminole shaman) briefly assumes his brawny original form, he is seen mostly as a skeletal ghoul, whose toothy death mask is not at all dissimilar from the zombie Nazi colonel played by Ørjan Gamst in Tommy Wirkola’s DEAD SNOW (2009).

Over the decades, the sacred ground gag would recur time and time again in such films as Orville Wanzer’s THE DEVIL’S MISTRESS (1966), Earl E. Smith’s SHADOW OF CHIKARA (aka WISHBONE CUTTER, 1977), Peter F. Buffa’s THE GHOST DANCE (1980), Fred Olen Ray’s SCALPS (1983), Mary Lambert’s PET SEMATARY (1989), Antonia Bird’s RAVENOUS (1999) and Johnny Martin’s SKELETON MAN (2004) with a variety of dire results for the foolhardy, the cruel and the condescending.  The bargain basement SCALPS is certainly curious in its estimation of Native American culture, with the site of a long-forgotten massacre harboring both, we learn, the agonized souls of the wrongfully killed as well as absolute and unrelenting evil.  When tribal chanting and drums are heard in the middle of the night, the most sensitive of the archeology students surmises the sound emanates “from Hell,” which strikes me as blaming the victim taken to a jaw-dropping extreme.    The film pans out as so many leaves ripped the TARTU playbook, with the students being slaughtered one by one until the Final Girl, fully possessed by the resident Indian spirit, T-balls the Final Boy’s head from his shoulders with a tomahawk.  A beguiling and now exceedingly difficult to see variation on this chestnut is Avery Crounse’s EYES OF FIRE (1982).  Immediately distinctive for being set not on the western prairie but in the backwoods of the American south east, this odd little independent film takes place during the colonial era, as a band of societal outcasts break free of the constraints of New France to seek religious freedom in a shadowed valley into which not even the stoic Shawnee will venture.

Native Americans are mostly peripheral throughout EYES OF FIRE (we only ever see two Shawnee braves) although they remain foremost in the consciousness of the settlers as they are led into a very unpromising promised land by a shady cleric (an early role for veteran character actor Dennis Lipscomb).  “They’re savage,” Lipscomb’s randy Will Smythe proclaims of the local indigenous people, “but they’re also a noble people.  And with a little help, they could become Christians.”  The movie is a hodgepodge of effects and suffers from some ill-advised optical jiggery-pokery (trippy solarization tends to knock the viewer right out of the colonial mindset) but much of its imagery is indelible in an AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD (1972) way.  The doomed hubris of the pilgrims, who think they can bend nature to the will of their scripture, is beautifully communicated in the image of the Iwo Jima-like raising of a cross, rough-hewn out of tree branches and already sprouting tendrils from the cross beams that will pull theology kicking and screaming into the mossy maw of the wild.  In J.T. Petty’s THE BURROWERS (2008), civilized white men and prairie savages are equally endangered by the rise of ancient, carnivorous creatures from the bowels of the earth.  In the film’s downbeat conclusion, the Native American survivors of the carnage are assumed by the US Cavalry to be responsible for the killings (“Those blanket heads will peel you like an orange”) and duly hanged.  This sucker punch of a coda might seem precociously glib were it not for the fact that prominent 19th century Americans from Abraham Lincoln to L. Frank Baum advocated on some level the total annihilation of Native Americans as a regrettable “better safe than sorry” measure to be taken against the possibility of a mass uprising against whites.

Yet another interesting twist on this familiar set-up comes via Leo Garen’s HEX (aka THE SHRIEKING, 1971), released by Twentieth Century Fox with little to no fanfare in 1973.  Set on the Nebraska prairie in the immediate aftermath of World War I, the film attends the cultural and spiritual collision between the daughters of a recently deceased shaman and a troupe of ragtag ex-aviators and doughboys motorcycling towards California to make their fortunes as barnstormers.  “They ain’t been to school… they ain’t even American,” is the popular perception of half-breeds Oriole (NASHVILLE‘s Cristina Raines, billed as Tina Herazo) and Acacia (Hilary Thompson).  The only survivor of a European conclave wiped out by their first winter on American soil, the girls’ mother had been saved in childhood by the Indian scout who later fathered them and taught them the secrets of “the seasons, the creatures and the powers.”  By various transgressions against the sisters that seem to reflect the seven deadly sins (lust, jealousy, anger), the number of the bikers is winnowed down to two, leading to an unexpectedly offbeat upbeat conclusion that supports the importance of cross-breeding to maintain a healthy populace.  This agrees with ethnohistorical  accounts of Indian exogamy, of mating outside of the local gene pool, and the film is also disarmingly smart about the use of language.  While the Native characters speak simply and elementally (“What you see, that’s what’s here”), the dialogue of the veterans and locals alike is embroidered with vernacular ephemera (“23 skidoo, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” must have been the early 20th century version of “WhassssssssUP?”) that etches these ostensible moderns as inessential and superficial, their addiction to internal combustion a clue to their abnegation of soul.  (The film’s highlight is one character’s psychic freakout, which employs the simplest of in-camera trickery to suggest one person’s physical world being turned inside out like a glove.)  The script by Doran William Cannon and Vernon Zimmerman pits technology against magic and allows the ancients to gain the upper hand at the fade out but they, of course, knew how the bigger story ends… and so do we.  Nonetheless, HEX remains another unjustly neglected curio, a relic of an extremely diverse and vibrant decade of filmmaking.

Pt. 2 of this essay will appear next Friday.

Special thanks to a number of colleagues who helped with materials or observations during the writing of this piece: Paul Gaita, Stephen Bissette, Bill Cooke, Kim Newman, Robert Richardson, David Konow, Craig Blamer and Howard S. Berger.

Special thanks also to my part-Shinnecock wife, Barb,  for her love and support and for giving me two blue-eyed savages.  The beat goes on.