For this last installment of “First in Fear: Native Americans in Horror Films,” we turn to the subject of Helpful Indians – those shamans, scouts, sure-shots and spirit guides who help Anglos out of sticky wickets, both supernatural and otherwise.  I think we all know where to turn for the prototype of the Helpful Indian.  Tonto, the “faithful Indian companion” of The Lone Ranger, wasn’t the first Helpful Indian – I suppose that distinction should be bestowed upon Chingachgook, the Mohican companion of Natty Bumppo, the Anglo-blooded, Native-raised protagonist of James Fennimore Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales – but Tonto branded the notion of aboriginal bravery, cunning and loyalty in the service of the Great White Father.  Tonto was played most indelibly by actor Jay Silverheels, a Canadian Mohawk, on the long-running TV series and subsequent movie spin-offs.  Silverheels’ success engendered a backlash, with Tonto equated in popular culture with the Uncle Tom archetype of shuffling, subservient Negroes.  He took it in stride, I guess, acting when he could, doing good deeds for Native kids in his homeland, establishing a workshop for American Indian actors in Los Angeles and sometimes having a laugh at the role that made him famous (“My name is Tonto… I hail from Toronto… I speak Esperanto…”).  The Long Ranger/Tonto axis had a variant in Republic’s Red Ryder/Little Beaver vehicles starring Bill Elliot and a young Robert Blake.  MARSHAL OF LAREDO (1945) has a quasi-horror slant, with Little Beaver assisting his growed-up pal with his trademark “You betchum, Red Ryder.” Horror elements crept into a number of B westerns of this era but Helpful Indians in a true horror setting were a longer time in coming.

Given the preponderance of horror movies set in the American southwest during the 1970s, it’s remarkable how many of them don’t utilize Native characters.  THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN (1971), THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1971), WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS (1971), NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1972), ENTER THE DEVIL (1972), RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975) and THE DEVIL’S RAIN (1975) all make-do without any help from the First Nation.  Yet in time, Natives were trucked into the genre as sensitive, spiritual and stoic voices of reason.  In the parlance of the Greeks, these indigenous people serve as Cassandras; in the parlance of the slasher films, they’re the Crazy Ralphs.  They speak the truth and no one listens.   Branded drunks or locos, they are left behind by foolhardy whites with a condescending pat on the back or the head and can only watch with grief in their hearts as the inevitable becomes actual.  Such is the story of Billy, the Seminole scout played by Bill Marcus in DEATH CURSE OF TARTU (1966).  Billy tries to warn a local high school teacher protagonist against dragging four teens into a historied hammock of the Everglades but can only look on as the fools find their fates.  Providing a similar service is Billy Ironwing (George Randall, above right) in Fred Olen Ray’s SCALPS (1983), in which a clutch of college kids tramp unwisely onto an historical massacre site and pay with their lives… and their scalps.  Similarly, an undercover search and rescue team in Johnny Martin’s SKELETON MAN (2004) encounters another crazy old Indian (New York actor Robert Miano, whose stock-in-trade is usually Latins) who talks a lot of kooky gobbledygook that only hits home as various members of the squad find themselves pinned on the end of the spear wielded by restless Native haint Cottonmouth Joe.  So, in his own way, Blind Indian is a Helpful Indian.

Question:  When is a Helpful Indian not a Helpful Indian?  Answer: When he doesn’t help!  Such is the story of  John Rainbird, the one-eyed Cherokee Vietnam vet hitman in the employ of a shadowy government agency in Mark L. Lester’s FIRESTARTER (1984), based on the novel by Stephen King.  The story trucks Rainbird in as a false friend to pyrokinetic protagonist Charlie McGee (Drew Barrymore) but he develops an unhealthy obsession that has him planning to murder the girl to absorb her unearthly powers.  Rainbird is a serious badass and an estimable villain in an otherwise dreary 80s horror movie.  As far as I know, George C. Scott didn’t have a lick of Native American blood in him but the character does take the presentation of Native Americans in horror movies a step forward by painting Rainbird as a complex, modern character straddling two worlds – the secular world that pays his rent and the mystical realm of his ancestors.  Rainbird doesn’t manifest any of the heightened powers of perception that are normally foisted upon American Indian characters but Scott convinces you that he believes he does, right up until the very moment he is barbecued for his treachery.

Helpful Indians don’t get more helpful than Will Sampson in POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE (1986), the sequel to the Steven Spielberg-produced, Tobe Hooper-directed smash of 1982.  POLTERGEIST was uninterested in racism or ecology and in fact had no Native American content at all, being more interested in skewering acquisitive Reagan era values.  At the end of the original film, middle America’s floor show of conspicuous consumption was revealed to be laid over the bones of the angry dead.  In this case, said dead aren’t Natives but the inhabitants of an Anglo graveyard paved over to accommodate a quaint bedroom community.  In the sequel, the Freiling family is still being hagged by restless spirits and they accept, with some reluctance, the help of Sampson’s gentle shaman.  Sampson’s big break had come playing a Native character in Milos Forman’s ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1975), which put him in Helpful Indian mode for the rest of his life.  He helped fisherman Richard Harris at the cost of his own life in Michael Anderson’s ORCA (1977) but fares better here; his participation elevates an otherwise stinky and unnecessary project.  A member of the Creek nation, Sampson remained angry about the treatment of Native Americans in cinema.  “Hollywood writers and directors are still using ‘em for livestock,” he is quoted as having said shortly before his death in 1987.  “They somehow just can’t seem to bring it around to give the truth about Indians.”

William Girdler’s DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1978), a revenge of nature film that hearkens back in certain ways to DEATH CURSE OF TARTU (albeit with vengeance served up not by an undead Seminole shaman assuming animal forms but by actual animals cheesed off by the hole in the ozone layer), lands a savvy dig at the manufacture of Red Indians for the entertainment of Anglos, with Leslie Nielson’s White Son of a Bitch bragging that his ad agency invented the Crying Indian played by Iron Eyes Cody in those old “Keep America Beautiful” ads.  Girdler’s follow-up, THE MANITOU (1978) has thoughts of its own about the place of Natives in Anglo society but keeps sociology and politics on the back burner while firing up the exploitation coals.  When a reincarnation-ready, 400 year old shaman known as Misquimacus attempts to reenter the physical world via a carbuncle on the neck of Susan Strasberg, ex-husband Tony Curtis (a bogus psychic with a fake pornstache) intervenes with the assistance of Helpful Indian John Singing Rock (Michal Ansara).  The movie is cheesy fun from topper to tails as the skin-peeling, corpse-reanimating, IBM Selectrix-exploding Misquimacus stomps the terra… but it’s Ansara’s work as a reluctant hero that keeps THE MANITOU from being a complete geek show.

Of Syrian descent, Ansara’s dark skin made him a natural for playing Hollywood exotics of every stripe, from Apache chieftain Cochise on the ABC-TV series BROKEN ARROW to a Klingon commander on STAR TREK.  In Gordon Douglas’ ONLY THE VALIANT (1951) – an Indian massacre movie that plays as a dry run for his later CHUKA (1967) – Ansara plays one of those marauding renegades whose anarchic machinations are cloaked in horror movie tropes, right down to the shock reappearance after the audience thinks he’s dead.  Chief Tuscos shares certain qualities with THE STALKING MOON‘s Salvaje and star Gregory Peck even bests the savage in a similar, hand-to-hand combat.  Michael Ansara always did have a great demonic side, which is what makes his work as John Singing Rock so unexpectedly satisfying.  The actor was pushing 60 when he signed on for that role and he brings to it the right mixture of spirituality and world-weariness.  John Singing Rock is charismatic in his Misquimaqus-thwarting until the script shoves him aside in the final frames in favor of an ill-conceived and executed cosmic mano a mano between “the wooden Indian with magic powers” (who has been deformed and shrunken by medical x-rays) and a naked Strasberg, who hurls energy balls from the palms of her hand while Tony Curtis talks smack to “the Mix-Master.”  The ending stinks but there’s a nice coda as Curtis puts Ansara into a San Francisco taxi and bids him fare-the-well.  One wishes John Singing Rock could have come back in his own series of monster-aggravating movies, fighting the good fight and taking his payment in tobacco and deferred endowments to the Native American Education Foundation.

Christophe Gans’ BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (LES PACTE DES LOUPS, 2001) featured one of the great Helpful Indians in all of horror movie history, a character who repurposed the qualities of the Vengeful Indian and made them truly heroic.  Played by Honolulu-born actor Mark Dascosos (whose complex bloodline includes strains of Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and Irish), the intense and handy Mani is a Micmac tribesman who keeps company with French adventurer Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), whom he considers a blood brother.  The pair accepts a commission from King Louis XV to investigate a slew of horrific murders plaguing 18th France and attributed by the superstitious locals to the mythic Beast of Gevaudan.   Fans were divided on BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF, with some decrying its bouillabaisse of Hong Kong style martial arts and the depiction of Mani as the stereotypical Fierce Warrior with Spiritual Powers but others (including yours truly) thrilled to the collision of cinematic style and wall-to-wall thrills.  The film is a rare big ticket opportunity for Dascosos, a veteran of direct-to-video, who is a memorable Native character who cracks serious skull in the process of being helpful.

No one would accuse Gary Farmer’s ghostly Nobody of being an “apple” – derisive slang for Natives who are red on the outside, white on the inside.  Actually, no one is really sure who or what Nobody is.  Johnny Depp’s companion and possible spirit guide through the existential Hell of Jim Jarmush’s “acid western” DEAD MAN (1990), Nobody is a Plains Indian who nonetheless speaks the language of a number of tribes and reads poetry to boot.  Described in the film as a Native who was stolen from his tribe and exhibited in Europe as a model of the perfect Indian, Nobody is an inscrutable, unflappable teddy bear who accepts the purpose of delivering Depp’s walking dead man to the spirit world where he belongs… even at the cost of his own life.  Canadian by birth and Iroquois by blood, Gary Farmer had a small role in the Santeria spooker THE BELIEVERS (1987) but was given considerably more to do in TALES FROM THE CRYPT: DEMON KNIGHT (1995) and ROUTE 666 (2001).  He reprised the role of Nobody in GHOST DOG: WAY OF THE SAMURAI (1999) and had a regular role on the vampire TV series FOREVER KNIGHT (1992-1994).

It’s not quite accurate to describe the Native woman played by Sheila Tousey in Antonia Bird’s RAVENOUS (1999) as a Helpful Indian – at least as have defined the archetype for the purposes of this essay – yet she just might be the last word on Helpful Indians.  In the blackly comic horror western, Manifest Destiny is served up on a steaming bed of cannibalism, a metaphor for the white man’s insatiable hunger for new lands, new territory, gold, power, sovereignty, domination.  Contrasted against the madness of the white soldiers stationed/banished to a snow-swept wilderness stronghold in the Sierra Nevadas, is the earthy simplicity of Tousey’s Martha and her brother George (Joseph Running Fox), Ojibwas who assist the Anglos as scouts, cooks, horsemen and servants.  (I don’t think the names given to the characters by screenwriter Ted Griffin are a reference to Edward Albee’s WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF but I could be wrong.)  George ultimately falls victim to a bullet fired by the cannibal Colqhoun (Robert Carlysle), whose sickness then spreads to infect the rest of the soldiers… some of whom become flesh eaters and some of whom become dinner.  In the end, as hero and villain – cannibals both – engage in a gory pas de deux, Martha turns her back on society.  Unsure of who the real bad guy is but certain that neither is anything close to good and pure, Martha declines to get involved, she rejects the possibility of a teachable moment and walks away, returning to the wilderness that is her true home.  A Wisconsin native and a member of the Menominee and Stockbridge-Munsee tribes, Sheila Tousey received a FAITA (First Americans in the Arts) award for “Outstanding Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Film)” for her work in RAVENOUS.

And this is where I hop off.  There are other Helpful Indians and other movies worthy of discussion but this thing could go on forever.  When I began at the top of the month, in observance of Turner Classic Movies’ festival of Native Americans in Film, I thought doing a piece on horror movies could be an easy A.  Four weeks and nearly 10,000 words later, well… here we are.  I’ve learned a lot this month and hope I’ve inspired some of you to seek out the Native American-themed or accented horror movies out there, as well as non genre films featuring Natives as actors and/or characters.  And please… if an old tribesman tells you not to trespass onto sacred land, do what the guy says and go to the Olive Garden instead.