HORROR AND INDIGENEITY

 

I just received my contributor's copy of HORROR AND INDIGENEITY: LITERATURE, FILM, AND TELEVISION, a handsome volume edited by Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes (published by the University of Texas Press). The book includes my essay "We Had a Mutant Bear Problem," which analyzes the image of Native Americans in such horror films as John Frankenheimer's PROPHECY, Elliot Silverstein's THE CAR, and other films and television shows of the 1970s (including one of my favorite TV shows of all time, KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER). This article situates these cultural artifacts in the context of AIM, the wrongful conviction of Leonard Peltier, and the activism of Native American standup comedians like Charlie Hill. I'm not certain if this was on purpose, but the book is scheduled to be released next month during the Semiquincentennial of the United States.

Here's the publisher's description of HORROR AND INDIGENEITY...

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 Indigenous 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 antiracism 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 provocative terms.

PRAISE FOR HORROR AND INDIGENEITY:

"Horror and Indigeneity is a must-read for scholars, students, filmmakers, and horror fans everywhere. It makes a major contribution to the fast-growing field of Indigenous horror studies while providing context and meaning for authors, producers, practitioners, and audiences alike. Through fifteen fascinating chapters, this book explores the spectrum of Indigenous representation across time and genres, first unpacking the history of the tropes of the 'uncivilized Native,' the 'Indian burial ground,' and 'the merciless Savage' as they have played out in literature, film, and television over more than a century, before delving into the trajectory of Indigenous counternarratives of colonialism-as-monster. Through interviews and chapters exploring the slashers, dramas, documentaries, mysteries, and thrillers that have featured spirits, mutants, zombies, windigos, ghosts, and other fearsome figures, this book unsettles the horror genre and answers the question: Who are the real savages we should fear?"

-- Heather Igloliorte, coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories in the United States and Canada

"This ambitious edited volume makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Indigenous studies and fills a gap in the scholarly study of horror films, novels, and television shows from the perspectives of other disciplines aligned with Indigenous studies. The coeditors pull all the threads together, and the accessibility of different chapters will make them useful in both undergraduate and graduate studies courses."

--Cailín E. Murray, editor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History

"Horror and Indigeneity is a significant contribution to horror studies, representing an important early step in introducing decolonial perspectives into the study of horror and providing a foundation upon which future scholars can build. As editors, Murray Leeder and Gary D. Rhodes do an excellent job framing the volume and establishing the need for it. The scope of the volume will make it an important scholarly resource that will undoubtedly appear on the shelves of many horror scholars."

--Kendall R. Phillips, author of A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema

You can order HORROR AND INDIGENEITY through Amazon.

Reports from Trumplandia: The Unhinged Meltdown Edition

1) From Max Rego's 6-7-26 THE HILL article entitled "Four Takeaways from Trump’s Explosive Interview":

[T]he interview got a bit heated more than 35 minutes in, after the president [...] repeated his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” in favor of former President Biden and said that “it’s happening again right now in California.”

In the Golden State, vote-counting is still ongoing — with 73 percent of the vote counted as of Sunday morning, according to Decision Desk HQ.

While Democrat Xavier Becerra will advance to the November general election, according to Decision Desk HQ, whom he will face is uncertain — Republican Steve Hilton, in second, leads Democrat Tom Steyer by 4.78 points.

Trump criticized California for the delay in tallying, asking [Kristen] Welker, “Do you think it’s appropriate that they have an election and five days later, they’re nowhere close to picking a winner?”

The president then said that election officials in California are “crooked,” along with Welker and her media colleagues [...].

Welker replied, “To be fair. I’m not crooked,” and attempted to move the conversation along. She also repeatedly noted that there is no evidence that the 2020 presidential election or the California primary was rigged.

“You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” the president responded. “You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”

Trump later said, “Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.”

“And so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” He then called NBC News a “one-sided crooked network.”

“Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time,” the president added, before taking off his microphone and tossing it to the ground.

To read Rego's entire article, click HERE. 

2) From Ben Blanchet's 6-7-26 HUFFPOST article entitled "'Dude Is Losing His ****': Trump Clowned For Rage Quitting On 'Meet The Press'":

Journalist Ahmed Baba used the clip to declare that the president "unravels when his delusional unreality faces the slightest pushback."

He wrote, "When he's out of his sycophantic bubble, he's forced to grapple with the fragility of his lies, the backlash to his overreach, and his mounting political weakness. He can't handle the truth."

To read Blanchet's entire article, click HERE. 

3) From Ralph Nader's 6-1-26 COUNTERPUNCH article entitled "Tyrant Trump’s Thunderous Corruption, Cruelty, and Lawbreaking":

Trump’s wrecking, endangering, and weakening of America worsens by the day, as he doubles down and calls his critics “deranged,” “demented,” “wackos,” “weak,” “low-IQ,” “crazy,” and “treasonous.” Moreover, his vicious expletives expand by the day.

However, the Tide is finally turning against the failed gambling Czar and Netanyahu dittohead. Trump’s relentless greed is starting to undermine his dwindling support, despite his control of the Republican primaries. The headlines tell the story of his decline, and not just in the polls, with approval ratings down to 35%. The majority of Americans polled – nearing sixty percent – want him impeached and removed from office. This demand comes without the backing of the Democratic Party leadership, still skittish about mounting an Impeachment Drive. The case for Impeachment is aided and abetted daily by Trump’s outrages [...].

So, the water in the Senate GOP’s cauldron may be starting to boil. They know about Nixon’s experience in 1974 coming off winning 49 out of 50 states in the 1972 election. With Nixon’s polls sinking after the Watergate scandal (a quaintly modest one-time crime, compared to Trump’s hundreds of continuing scandals), the Congressional GOP saw itself sinking in the 1974 elections. A delegation of GOP Senators went to the White House and told Nixon, “Mr. President, your time is up.” Nixon resigned days later.

One can envision something similar today. Trump is an unstable lame duck outlaw, including violating congressional authorities. Republicans have to face the voters in November. They are likely to lose the House. The Senate has 20 Republican Senators up for election compared to only 12 Democrats. They have a three-vote margin now. Trump, given his economy, his chosen wars, his unrestrained greed and self-enrichment, is making prospects of a Democratic win in the Senate more possible.

Had the Democrats not ceded half the states (the red states) to the Republicans decades ago, leaving behind remnants of their organized presence, almost all the Republican Senators running this year could be at risk. Instead, only about six have competitive races – thank you, obtuse Democratic Party.

In any event, most politicians, however servile they may have been to a President, prefer saving their own political skins to falling on their swords for an unpopular president losing his cognitive grip and voter sensitivity by the day. (See the April 30, 2026 statement from medical professionals in the Congressional Record – “Medical Concerns About President Donald J. Trump and His Fitness For Office.”) Do you know any other president who would say “I don’t care about the financial condition of Americans” in the midst of surging inflation, rising food, health care, rental, and gasoline prices? A president who is using the White House to massively enrich himself and his family. (See Cashing in on the presidency: https://www.americanprogress.org/feature/trumps-take/)...

To read Nader's entire article, click HERE. 

4) From Alfred W. McCoy's 6-3-26 COUNTERPUNCH article entitled "After America":

Since most Americans came late (if at all) to the realization that their country was indeed an imperial power, and a stunningly powerful one at that, they have generally remained oblivious to its aging and the inevitable erosion of global power that accompanies such aging. Ever since, in the late eighteenth century, English scholar Edward Gibbon published his monumental, multi-volume study, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, succeeding imperial rulers have tended to assume that their imperial realms would last, like ancient Rome’s, half a millennium or more. Adolf Hitler, with his dream of “the Thousand-Year Reich,” was hardly the only one to share such an illusion [...].

In his second term, President Trump’s foreign policy has further weakened the U.S. global position. At the western axial end of the Eurasian continent, he compromised NATO, the largest and longest-lasting alliance in modern military history, by pressing Denmark, a founding member of the alliance, to cede its sovereign territory of Greenland, creating a serious crisis and compelling the Europeans to begin acting autonomously when it came to both trade and defense issues.

At the eastern end of Eurasia, Trump’s intervention in Iran and the blocking of key oil supplies to Asia, thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, weakened longstanding bilateral alliances with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea. The thousands of missiles the U.S. has fired at Iran have also reduced its ability to defend the island of Taiwan and forced Washington to begin withdrawing stocks of missiles from South Korea — exposing both the limits of its military power and Asia’s lowered priority.

As the New York Times editorial board put it after Donald Trump’s recent Beijing summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (where the U.S. president showed a “worrisome lack of interest” in Taiwan), “America’s inability to defeat Iran’s much smaller military has raised questions about whether it could help defend Taiwan from a mainland invasion.” If China ultimately takes that island, the U.S. defensive perimeter in the Pacific would be pushed back from the “first island chain” (Japan-Taiwan-the Philippines) to the “second island chain” (Japan-Guam) — inflicting a major geopolitical blow on the U.S. by crippling its capacity to aid its Asian allies.

More broadly, the Trump administration’s plans, as stated in its recent National Security Strategy, for “a readjustment of our global military presence” by shifting forces into the Western Hemisphere would be tantamount, if fully implemented, to a unilateral surrender in what foreign policy experts have come to call “the new Cold War” with Beijing and Moscow.

To read McCoy's entire article, click HERE. 

Reports from Trumplandia: The Dr. Abuse Edition

"NPR interviewed a Trump voter in Georgia who said he thought the President was doing 'an A+ job.' When asked how his family was dealing with rising food prices, the man replied, 'My wife and I fast.' What’s the cure for this mass mesmerism? Trump’s like Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, without the medical degree."

--Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of COUNTERPUNCH, 5-20-26

My former Creative Writing instructor, Rachel Pollack (1945-2023), who was a multiple award-winning novelist and short story writer, once compared Donald Trump to her own Dr. Mabuse analog, Dr. Abuse, a mad villain she created for a wonderfully bizarre DC comic book called THE GEEK. In a 10-22-17 interview with NEWSARAMA, Rachel said, "Joe [Corallo] asked if we could do another revival of THE GEEK, and I immediately thought, like, Dr. Abuse has returned as Donald Trump. So after the first story, his essence is banished, so it floats around and settles in President Trump. I don’t know if they’d want to get that political, but I think that would be really fun."

You can read this entire interview by clicking right HERE. 

I mention this merely as an excuse to plug one of my favorite DC comics of the 1990s, namely Rachel Pollack and Michael Allred's one-shot revival of THE GEEK (originally created by Joe Simon in 1968) in which a lightning-charged mannequin named Brother Power faces off against the psychological machinations of the insidious Dr. Abuse. You can find the comic book in a recent DC collection entitled DC PRIDE: A CELEBRATION OF RACHEL POLLACK.

Previous CryptoPosts about Rachel Pollack can be found HERE and HERE!

Christine Morgan Reviews HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD!

Multiple award-winning novelist Christine Morgan has just reviewed my latest nonfiction book, HOLLYWOOD HAUNTS THE WORLD: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE CINEMA OF OCCULTED TABOOS. Here's a brief excerpt:

The dedication, effort, and sheer time it must have taken in order to put this book together, I can only hazard a guess. Yet Guffey, who’s proven himself time and again a master of whatever aspect of the craft he happens to be tackling at the time, makes it look easy [...]. Entire college courses could — and SHOULD — be built around this book. Outstanding!

To read Morgan's entire review, click HERE.

I'd like to formally establish this mutual appreciation society by once again recommending Christine Morgan's ichthyophiliac masterpiece, NYMPHO SHARK FUCK FRENZY (an epic novel of Extreme Horror, Aquatic Erotica, and General High Strangeness written in collaboration with Susan Snyder), which took home the Wonderland Award for Best Novel at BizarroCon 2025. Please consider buying the book directly from the publisher, Madness Heart Press!

Mysterious Urban Warfare Drills

From Marc Sternfield's 6-5-26 KTLA news report entitled "Mysterious Urban Warfare Drills Rattle L.A. Area Residents":

An abandoned Long Beach hotel was the site of a dramatic U.S. military raid early Friday, part of a series of urban warfare exercises across the Los Angeles area this week.

The training took place at the Golden [Sails] Hotel on Pacific Coast Highway near Deer Drive shortly after midnight.

Multiple military helicopters were seen circling the building before dropping troops onto the roof. Troops deployed flash-bangs and went door to door inside the old hotel, using simulated gunfire.

Long Beach police officers provided traffic control and briefly closed Pacific Coast Highway in both directions.

Similar training exercises have taken place in other L.A. metro cities in recent days, frustrating some local residents [...].

The U.S. military has not offered an explanation for the timing of the exercises.

To read the entire report, click HERE.  

Military Conducts Overnight Training at Long Beach Hotel:

Pay special attention to the news report below. The nonchalant reaction to this militaristic activity on the part of some of the passersby is quite revealing. Is this what happens when the idea of paternal martial law becomes romanticized in mass consciousness via asymmetric warfare and psychological operations? Hmmm... could be...

U.S. Military Training Exercises in SoCal Surprise Residents:

 

ROBERT WILLIAMS: FEARLESS DEPICTIONS

This past weekend I attended the final day of FEARLESS DEPICTIONS, the latest exhibit of the legendary pop-surrealist painter, Robert Williams. If you're not familiar with his masterful work, I highly recommend checking out such art books as VISUAL ADDICTION, HYSTERIA IN REMISSION, and THROUGH PREHENSILE EYES as soon as possible. Though the FEARLESS DEPICTIONS showcase has now reached its conclusion, you can still see a little of what you missed by visiting the Exhibitions Page of the Long Beach Museum of Art.

I also suggest checking out Liz Goldner's 3-14-26 write-up of the show on her Substack page.

Not long ago, I was honored to receive a laudatory blurb from Williams for my 2023 novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, a Tiki-themed mixture of urban fantasy and Los Angeles noir that centered around the eccentric cryptozoological theories of Williams' late mentor, Stanislaw Szukalski (the subject of Irek Dobrowolski's 2018 Netflix documentary, STRUGGLE: THE LIFE AND LOST ART OF SZUKALSKI). This is how Williams described DEAD MONKEY RUM:

"Robert Guffey's fantastic novel, DEAD MONKEY RUM, will at least bring your brain out of a coma, if not get your imagination off the couch. This is a thinly masked tribute/adventure to the late Stanislaw Szukalski and his boundless imagination. This book is a mental gymnasium."

--ROBERT WILLIAMS

Alas, DEAD MONKEY RUM is now out of print, but I hope to see the novel made available again very soon. (FYI: My friend Damien, the subject of my third book, CHAMELEO, insists that DEAD MONKEY RUM is his favorite of all my books!) For the time being, you can still find used copies of DEAD MONKEY RUM floating around in the wild...

Having only spoken to Williams over the phone before this point, it was a pleasure to finally meet him in person and chat with him about the genesis of some of his most visually stunning works. Here are just a few favorite photographs taken while wandering around this mind-blowing exhibit... 

At the end of the day, I was happy to walk away with a signed copy of INK, BLOOD AND LINSEED OIL, a comprehensive collection of 66 essays written by Robert Williams over the course of 22 years. Hardcover copies are still available from the publisher, Last Gasp. Check it out!

 

Robert Williams Mr. Bitchin' | Official Trailer | Cinema Libre Studio:

"Something dead in the street commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas! It isn’t what you like, it’s what the fuck you want to see! Art is not the slave of decoration. Hail the voyeur, the only honest connoisseur!!!"

--Robert Williams, "Rubberneck Manifesto," VISUAL ADDICTION, 1989