For the past 10 years, Horror has seen a revolution led by diverse voices and confrontational stories. Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Julia Ducournau’s Titane, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw The TV Glow, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are beacons of hope for a genre that too many times has reverted back to the same tired perspectives when studios attempt to bank on its popularity rather than invest on its socio-political power. In between the release of these landmark films, a smaller production notably stood out in 2019 like an undead ghoul looking for a bite of brains (or fingers, or faces): Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Baranaby’s essential zombie film Blood Quantum.
Having left a strong mark with the unflinching coming-of-age horror/drama Rhymes For Young Ghouls, Barnaby decided to put his spin on an established monster. Tracking the origins of the zombie apocalypse in the Red Crow Indian Reservation in Quebec in 1981, the film hits the ground running as a fisherman guts salmon that continue to move, a hospital is overrun by the undead, and a woman eats her own child all in the span of a day. It’s brutal, inventive, and downright terrifying. Once the reservation realizes that they are immune to the virus turning white citizens into undead cannibals, they fortify their land against the horde rising outside their walls.
Barnaby, who sadly passed away just three years after Blood Quantum premiered, takes the zombie genre and flips it on its head. Using the socio-political tools laid out by zombie master George A. Romero, he crafts a culturally-specific horror tale that screams in the face of white-centric, colonized horror. The brilliance of Blood Quantum lies in its frank and complex depiction of a marginalized community having to contend with a newly-acquired hierarchy. Does the reservation completely shun the white community and live in peace or do they risk their lives for a people that has systematically kept them on the margins of society? That it poses these questions and also provides some of the most gnarly and gruesome zombie gore in modern horror is a testament to Barnaby’s ability and love for the genre.
