A collection of essays about Indigeneity and horror in cinema, literature, and beyond.

How did Indigeneity come to be horrifying? Think of the “Indian burial ground” trope, a staple of 1970s horror cinema, not to mention decades of western films and fictions that made “savage Indians” the face of fear in popular culture. Can horror do something else in the hands of Indegnous people? Creators such as Eden Robinson and Jeff Barnaby have self-consciously turned to horror to tell new kinds of stories, stories that question who is a monster and what constitutes the monstrous.

Horror and Indigeneity explores representations of Indigenous people in settler horror texts and in the growing corpus of horror by Indigenous writers and filmmakers. Widely spanning time periods and media, the contributors to this edited volume address themes such as cannibalism, eco-horror, historical trauma, and contemporary anti-racism as they relate to classical horror cinema and recent works such as The Dead Can’t Dance, Lovecraft Country, and Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians. Also featuring interviews with Jones and director T. J. Cuthand, Horror and Indigeneity rethinks the terror of the Other in potent and provactive terms.

Prestige Television explores how a growing array of 21st century US programming is produced and received in ways that elevate select series above the competition in a saturated market. Contributing authors demonstrate that these shows are positioned and understood as comprising an increasingly recognizable genre characterized by familiar markers of distinction. In contrast to most accounts of elite categorizations of contemporary US television programming that center on HBO and its primary streaming rivals, these essays examine how efforts to imbue series with prestigious or elevated status now permeate the rest of the medium, including network as well as basic and undervalued premium cable channels. Case study chapters focusing on diverse series, ranging from widely recognized examples such as The Americans (2013-2018) and The Knick (2014-15) to contested examples like Queen of the South (2016-2021) and How I Met Your Mother (2005-2014), highlight how contributing authors extend conceptions of the genre beyond expected parameters.