Horror is political. It always has been, and it always will be. Director Nyla Innuksuk’s feature debut SLASH/BACK is a thrilling, hilarious creature feature with engaging performances, terrific music and cinematography, and effective creature design. But it’s even more than that. It is an affecting portrait of teen girlhood and a strong political statement about Indigenous rights and taking pride in a marginalized heritage. Wearing its influences and its messages on its sleeve, SLASH/BACK is a winning combination for genre fans.
Four young friends — Maika (Tasiana Shirley), Jesse (Alexis Vincent-Wolfe), Leena (Chelsea Prusky), and Uki (Nalajoss Ellsworth) — go out exploring forbidden parts of their small town of Pangnirtung, Nunavut. When they see a strange-looking polar bear attacking Maika’s sister Aju (Frankie Vincent-Wolfe), Maika kills the bear and all five girls run back to the center of town. The bear’s face is wrong, somehow, and its blood is black. As they describe the weird phenomenon to the other kids in town, Uki starts bragging. Irritated, Maika dares her to go back to the spot where Maika killed the bear and see if there are any weird creatures Uki can actually kill; when she does, she discovers an alien spaceship and bizarre shapeshifting creatures with tentacles coming out of their eyes and mouths. With all the adults in town busy at a square dance, “the girls from Pang” must kill the remaining creatures and thwart the alien invasion themselves.
Co-written by Innuksuk and Ryan Cavan, SLASH/BACK is a clever nod to John Carpenter’s The Thing (which Jesse describes in detail to her friends before they see the Not-Bear) that carves its own way in the horror genre. The film achieves a breezy intimacy by focusing on teen girls, capturing experiences both universal and highly specific to Inuit culture. There are class differences among the friends, the kind that take on greater significance with age; they mainly manifest in the film in terms of how much cell phone data Leena has compared to the rest of her friends in their remote hamlet. Jesse and Maika have a crush on the same boy (Thomassie, played by Rory Anawak), and the subtle glances and moments of awkwardness as they dance around the topic will be immediately, painfully recognizable to viewers who faced the same struggles in their adolescent friend groups. Jesse will likely be many viewers’ favorite character, since she’s a horror fanatic who, upon hearing about the demise of a Not-Fox that Uki encounters on her solo mission, declares, “Nasty! …I love it.”
Though there is a bit of distracting CGI work, the creature effects are fantastic, especially when the shapeshifting aliens find human hosts. The aliens can’t mimic their hosts’ faces or motor skills well, and the lurching body horror monstrosities that chase the girls around Pang are terrifying and fun as hell to watch. Innuksuk gets some good scares out of these chase scenes, but SLASH/BACK keeps humor at the forefront, focusing on its characters’ reactions to the alien threat and keeping the film grounded in the world of female adolescence.
Another way SLASH/BACK stays grounded in reality is that it literally wears its politics on its sleeve: when Maika gets suited up for the climactic alien hunt, she puts on a leather jacket that says “no justice on stolen land” on the back. The end credits feature a title card that switches from SLASH/BACK to LAND/BACK and back again. Maika’s entire journey through the film is about making peace with and learning to love her Inuit heritage. She grew up hunting with her father Jobie (Jackie Maniapik), but as a teenager she tries to distance herself as much as possible from traditional culture, criticizing the Inuit art in Thomassie’s home, declaring her intention to move to Winnipeg as soon as possible, and saying she prefers KFC to traditional Inuit country food. However, a final image of her happily smiling from within Jobie’s country food stand shows how much she’s grown to love and appreciate her home and the important traditions within it. Even the genre elements themselves are political: it’s hard to ignore the parallels between incompetently shape-shifting alien invaders and colonialism, given white people’s predilection for stealing land and appropriating non-white cultures in embarrassingly inept ways.
SLASH/BACK is an original take on the kids-versus-aliens subgenre that showcases vital yet incredibly underrepresented Indigenous voices in horror. Paying homage to horror classics while telling your own unique story is a tricky feat to pull off, but Innuksuk and company do it with style. With its combination of strong political statements, cheeky humor, unsettling creature effects, and an engaging young cast, SLASH/BACK is a creature feature not to be missed.
Tags: Alexis Vincent-Wolfe, Body Horror, Chelsea Prusky, creature feature, Film Festivals, Frankie Vincent-Wolfe, Jackie Maniapik, john carpenter, Nalajoss Ellsworth, Nyla Innuksuk, Rory Anawak, Ryan Cavan, Slash/Back, SXSW, SXSW 2022, Tasiana Shirley, The Thing
No Comments