ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I am an Arts and Culture student in my last semester of studies at Dawson. I had only a mild but sustained interest in the horror genre before taking Jay Shea’s Reading the Classic Horror Film. Ever since, horror theory irrevocably ‘haunts’ the lenses through which I read any media, and even the ways I have come to contextualize my queer and social identities. I believe there is an incredible emotional intelligence and philosophy behind understanding the tools and effects of horror, especially as a means of resistance. I hope to pursue scenography and theatre studies in university, and further explore my newfound fascinations through my artistic practices.

–Gregory Chae

---

In their essay A Glossary of Haunting, Eve Tuck and C. Ree state that “Settler colonialism is the management of those who have been made killable, once and future ghosts—[…] Settler horror, then, comes about as part of this management, of the anxiety, the looming but never arriving guilt, the impossibility of forgiveness, the inescapability of retribution” (Tuck and Ree 642). Haunting threatens to expose what settler colonial management conceals; therefore, in maintaining the illusion of righteousness, prevailing colonial systems oppress and abject the arbitrary “others” they define and categorize. Barbara Creed, studying Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, observes about the categorized coexistence of the “subject” and the “abject,” that “Although the subject must exclude the abject, the abject must, nevertheless, be tolerated for that which threatens to destroy life also helps to define life. […] (T)he activity of exclusion is necessary to guarantee that the subject take up his/her proper place in relation to the symbolic” (Creed 9). The abject is only abject as it serves the survival of a subject; then the act of abjection suggests that the subject seeks benefit. When it comes to the persistence of colonial systems of oppression, the abject-ing confinement of indigenous peoples is justified as a necessary management to preserve the white colonial institution’s identity, and perpetuates violence and displacement of the indigenous population. Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls can be read as a haunting film that transforms the return of the abject into a manifestation of indigenous resistance. Haunting resists the entrapment of the Mi’gmaq population within the oppressive narratives and roles that justify violence against indigenous children. The latter, in the colonial gaze, are made to be “future ghosts,” haunting reminders which must be contained in residential schools, abused, and buried — abjected (Tuck and Ree 648, 649). Resistance will be emphasized through the deconstruction of a visceral “shit shower” scene where the haunting by the abject functions as an invasion of a colonial institution, a sabotage of ritual erasure, and a communal revenge and reclaiming of identity.

The return of the abject is a threat to the settler colonial institutional body as it signifies the persistence of a history it would like to cleanse and bury. In the scenes depicting Aila’s forced admission into the residential school, nuns aggressively strip her, grasp and cut off locks of her hair which fall discarded on the floor before Aila is shown in a bathtub, the shot pointed from above slowly moving away from her curled up naked form (00:57:03). The walls of the tub contain her as nuns run about, the violation of indigenous children’s bodies habitual to them. The human body — here Aila’s body — carries history, traces of actions, corporeal consequences of time elapsed; hair lengthens and food metabolizes. Yet the corporeal identity of indigenous children, a physical manifestation of a history which demands accountability and confrontation of wrongdoing, defies settler colonialism’s insistence on forgetting and denying. It threatens to expose the yet-persisting violations perpetrated by settler colonial institutions, and therefore, this history is abjected. This perceived threat is washed away in the ritual repetition of both the process of admission which strips the body of its rightful history, and Popper’s self-cleansing of his ‘sins,’ his abuse of the children, from his body. Defying these, the shit shower scene plays out at the climax of Aila’s heist of the residential school, an invasion of the institution.

The sabotage of Popper’s ritual reveals its superficiality, and a different ritual contends with that of superficial cleansing: a ritual of disguise, trickery and haunting. The shit shower itself is the final blow of the revenge heist, which falls on Halloween night. Aila wears a costume and mask of an old woman throughout. With the mask on, she crawls slowly on the bathroom floor, reaching for the safe keys, as the shower pipes begin to drip out, then fully release the Mi’gmaq people’s collected shit (Rhymes for Young Ghouls 1:09:08). Her costume reflects her claim to have aged a thousand years the day her mother committed suicide (00:07:11). Despite her new haircut, Aila takes on this new identity; on this day of haunting, Aila chooses to represent the generations of trauma, and the generations that have been abducted and killed, ghosts returning to get revenge on their oppressors. Her wrinkled mask, not serving the purpose of anonymity, empowers her, makes her wise beyond her years. No matter how much hair they cut off or how many baths they give, indigenous children continue to gather and manifest history. Despite their rituals, colonial forces fail to intercept the wisdom passed through generations because these are innately woven into, and generated by, historical identity and generational experience.

The shit shower scene returns a consciousness of mortality to the colonial institution. The ritual of cleansing functions to reinforce an illusion of invulnerability. The bathroom as a cleansing space allows Popper to lock away the reality of the violence and abuse within the walls of the school. This creates myths and stories, warnings against breaching the constructed innocence and lack of sin of the white settler colonial institution; abstraction of the concrete physical abuse isolates the institution from its culpability. Earlier in the film, Popper reads to Joseph, Aila’s dad, a verse from the Bible that “has kept [him] warm for the past seven years. ‘Vengeance and retribution are mine. In due time my enemy’s foot will slip, for the day of their calamity is near, and the impending sorrows and ruination are falling fast upon them’” (00:58:30). This verse, as if a nursery rhyme or prophesying story, reassures Popper of the righteousness of the institutional violence he protects and inflicts. With the retrospective knowledge of the prank to come, this verse takes on another, more literal meaning: it is Popper who faces visceral retribution, foot slipping as excrements fall upon him, leaving him squirming in brown on the floor of the bathroom, cleansing ruined. The material shit that bursts from the pipes is the culmination of collective production, collection, and invasion; it is a communal catharsis that materializes the resistance against being categorized as ‘future ghosts.’ White colonial categories of ‘human’ or alive and ‘ghoul’ or soon-to-be-dead are challenged by the corporeal proof of excrement. This reminder acts as a reversal of roles, which drags Popper back to the reality of his own physicality, a vulnerability which makes him a likely target of revenge. Popper meets his ultimate end when Jujijj, Aila’s mentee-of-sorts, shoots his head open, and his lifeless body falls to the ground (1:19:23). With the splattering of his blood which should be contained in the shell of his body, Popper’s death betrays the mortality of authorities. They too, can be reduced to breathing, bleeding, shitting living beings made of flesh and bones.

In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the colonial abject—the indigenous peoples and past—uses haunting to sabotage rituals of cleansing and mythologizing of colonial violence, surfacing a buried consciousness of history and mortal vulnerability. Rhymes for Young Ghouls warns us to examine the motives of abjection, and the larger oppressive systems which utilize a fundamental need of abjection against marginalized peoples in order to preserve themselves.

 

Works Cited

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. Léa, English BXE, uploaded by Jay Shea, 29 October 2024. Dawson College.

Rhymes for Young Ghouls. Directed and written by Jeff Barnaby, monterey media, 2014. 

Tuck, Eve and C. Ree. “A Glossary of Haunting.” Handbook of Autoethnography, Left Coast Press, 2013, pp. 639-659.