Spectres of the Past Necropolitics and Colonial Trauma in Dark Place
Dark Place (2019) is an anthology work comprised of five short films that variously represent the horrors of the Australian settler-colonial mythscape. Premiering at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival, the shorts – all made by Indigenous filmmakers – explore themes such as enslavement, monstrosity, possession and torture, among others. Such ideas resonate with philosopher Achille Mbembe’s conception of ‘necropolitics’, which posits that ‘[t]o exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power’.1 This refracted expression of Foucauldian ‘biopower’2 underpins the ways in which particular bodies – here, those of Indigenous people – are precariously suspended between life and death.
As is typical of the horror genre, the Dark Place shorts attempt to evoke fears around haunted pasts, isolation, the unknown and the supernatural. Kodie Bedford’s ‘Scout’ is a female revenge film in which enslaved Indigenous women reclaim their lives. In Liam Phillips’ ‘Foe’, the spectre of grief reveals itself as an insomniac’s evil twin. An Indigenous single mum struggles against witchcraft in Rob Braslin’s suburban horror ‘Vale Light’. Vampires, possession and the Australian Gothic are convergent motifs in Perun Bonser’s ‘The Shore’, about a father and daughter isolated in the bush. And Bjorn Stewart’s ‘Killer Native’ is a historical-comedy zombie piece, staging first contact as a blood-spattered slapstick comedy.
As these works evidence, the horrific reverberations of colonisation can give rise to cinematic complexity and a structuring logic, while simultaneously burdening Indigenous filmmakers with the arduous
