Cartoon short asks Stephen King a simple question: What’s with all the “Indian burial grounds?”
Comedian and writer Joey Clift makes a case for ditching a stereotypical horror setting found in several of King's books
Film Features Burial
Stephen King has created or popularized a lot of the past century’s most indelible horror imagery. He’s also done the same with racial stereotypes, featuring magical Black characters and using cursed “Indian burial grounds” in a good portion of his sizable catalog of work.
The latter bit is the focus of a new animated short from comedian, TV writer, and enrolled Cowlitz Tribal Member Joey Clift that asks a straightforward question beginning right from its title: “What’s With All The Native Burial Grounds In Horror Stories?”
Clift, who you may recognize from contributing to The A.V. Club in the past and helping pick up Sufjan Stevens’ 50 states project where he left off, wrote and directed the video. Through narration voiced by Ghosts’ Román Zaragoza, Clift addresses why the burial ground trope, usually dated back to the publication of The Amityville Horror and featured in King’s Pet Sematary and The Shining, exists to invent, distort, and mystify actual Indigenous practices—especially when European burial grounds, like the Paris catacombs, and accepted religious rituals, like the Pope ingesting symbolic blood and flesh, have the potential to be so much scarier.
The burial ground video is the latest in Gone Native, a Comedy Central digital series created, directed, and written by Clift that, as he puts it in an email description, is made with the goal “to use jokes to shine a light on all of the weird microaggressions that Native folks deal with on a regular basis.”
Gone Native’s first episode discusses the American school system’s “near complete lack of education about contemporary Native people” and its second addresses “Non-Natives using important Native terms like ‘Spirit Animal.’”
Check the trio of them out for more on these topics—and some great visuals, like a Dracula Pope and the nation of Italy drawn as a severed, bleeding foot in a boot.
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116 Comments
wow… these are awful. like not even remotely funny
Maine is the Indian Burial Ground capitol of the world.
So, by “several of King’s books,” you mean “one of King’s books.” The Ritual of Chud, in It, in explicitly based on Tibetan rituals, not Indian ones. The modern filmmakers changed it to be created by Indians, so blame them.The Overlook Hotel wasn’t built on Indian burial ground in the book, either; that’s from Kubrick’s movie.And Pet Semetary doesn’t just generically call them “Indian burial grounds,”; they’re specifically Mi’kmaq burial grounds.
Honestly what an annoying fucking video and article. Inaccurate and unfunny.
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Possible unpopular opinion: King is mostly overrated and sucks at writing a good ending.
I think his non-horror books (like 11/22/63) are underrated and his horror books mostly overrated, except for the early ones like Carrie that helped define modern horror
Stephen King sucks at writing endings has been a trope since at least the 1990s (probably earlier but I don’t remember that far back), it’s hardly an unpopular opinion.
That commenter is a troll. They really thought they were going to trigger someone with what is common sentiment.
“King sucks at endings” is the popular opinion.
Fair enough, I guess the more unpopular opinion would be “he is overrated”
OMG. I thought I was the only one who thought this.
I’ve always perceived it as a horror trope steeped in American guilt, as a form of generational revenge for indigenous genocide. As in: “Ok, you killed us all, can’t you at least leave our burial grounds undisturbed? No? Ok, fine, here’s your dead wife and child returned to murder you.”
“I’ve always perceived it as a horror trope steeped in American guilt, as a form of generational revenge for indigenous genocide.
What, you expect a youtube video to have RESEARCH in it?
thanks, that’s it exactly. It’s not about Native Magic, It’s the curse of colonial genocide.
That’s certainly part of it, but there’s also the fear of the unknown, where there’s this mysterious, almost Lovecraftian spiritual dimension that’s both entirely foreign and right under our noses, waiting to be stumbled into. The “genocide” angle certainly plays into that. “Oh yeah, there were people who totally understood the rules around all this stuff, but we killed them all so now we’re just kinda fucked.”
That’s the supernatural element present in almost all of his work, regardless of plot, characters, or setting. And I understand why he constantly goes back to that well, because the thought of that is terrifying.
Oh yeah, in Stephen King World eventually everything comes back to The Dark Tower and The Man In Black and Gan, including Western, Eastern, and Native American religion and folklore.
That, and paving over burial grounds and Native land without consideration to the people living on those lands. We don’t need another strip mall or parking lot.
Here’s the thing, maybe writers should do a better job of depicting Native Americans as real people, rather than spooky bugaboos in stories centered around whites.
“Each tribe has their own burial practices but they don’t call them Indian Burial Grounds”
NEITHER DOES STEPHEN KING. In Pet Sematary it is not an Indian Burial Ground, it is a Mi’kmaq burial ground.
And there is actually no mention of an Indian burial ground or any Native American influence at all in King’s The Shining, it was ALL added by Stanley Kubrick.
Also, Pet Sematary was written MORE THAN FOUR FUCKING DECADES AGO.
He did it *ONCE* and didn’t do the generic “indian burial ground” thing AT ALL.
Get your shit straight before you start complaining about others, you ignorant fuck.
King’s Pet Sematary and The Shining
I thought it was just the former, while Kubrick is responsible for adding more references to natives in the film adaptation of the latter.
Not a great trope, but dude’s written close to 100 books, so that’s about 2%.In the 1% category, by that metric? Underage sewer gangbang. Yes, seriously.
“Not a great trope, but dude’s written close to 100 books, so that’s about 2%.”
ONE novel out of 80+
Yeah, that. I glossed over the 1990 miniseries adaptation, and haven’t seen the more recent movies (yet), but that GB definitely stood out reading the book as a teenager myself. Was that ever “addressed” on the small or big screen?
It was left out of both adaptations, thank Christ.
Except the really should’ve figured out a way to convey to the audience that, compared to Eddie Kaspbrack, Ben Hanscomb has a huge dong. I mean, it’s definitely a contributing factor in Bev getting together with him after they defeat it the second time. Book Bev is a size queen.This is what Stephen King thought was important when he was coked up and what his editor didn’t stop him from publishing – that a pre-teen girl pulled a train with some guys and how she remarked on how big another pre-teen kid’s pipe was.
Well, the editor may have been coked up as well.
Maybe somewhere in the Dark Tower multiverse there’s a world where Stephen King has an editor, but this one ain’t it. Either that, or his editor simply never made it that far in that 1,000+ page tome.
Yep. Almost put the book down.
I sincerely hope that post wouldn’t moisten my grandpa.
I always thought it was because Ben was really aroused more than probably the others.
I’ll defer to you, since you put thought into it. But I guess that makes sense because Ben had a big crush on Bev. The fact that S.K. was doing lines and thinking – “of course the one kid’s penis will be more engorged because he has a crush on her, so it just stands to reason she’ll notice how big it is” should be disqualifying for any author not writing stories for FBI agents in chat rooms.
I’ve read that book 16 times and I get the symbolism and stuff from that scene. It doesn’t bother me or weird me out anymore. But why did it take me until this most recent reading for that part to stick with me. “No, like, it was MASSIVE. I mean wow, for real,” is basically what Bev thinks.
Although I still laugh at those who did a little posture of worry when those movies were announced at whether they would include that scene. Of course they’re not going to include that scene, Jesus H. Christ.
I was in college when the miniseries originally aired and the first thing my roommate mentioned when we saw the initial ad for it was that scene. He was joking, but I’m guessing it’ll be awhile before ‘It’ gets mentioned and people don’t immediately to go to kids fucking in a sewer.
I mean, as far as jarring shit goes, HOO BOY is that a prime example.
I’m from the Deep South. We call stuff like that an average Thursday.
King has fully admitted he was in the worst of his cocaine addiction while writing that scene, and he very much regrets it.
It feels like the kind of scene that should be be excised out of a future “preferred author’s edition” or some such.
Where? I can’t find any interview or writing newer than 2017 where he doesn’t make excuses for it.
To be more precise King wrote on his own forum in 2013: I wasn’t really thinking of the sexual aspect of it. The book dealt with childhood and adulthood –1958 and Grown Ups. The grown ups don’t remember their childhood. None of us remember what we did as children–we think we do, but we don’t remember it as it really happened. Intuitively, the Losers knew they had to be together again. The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It’s another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children’s library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues.When asked, in 2017, if that was actually him posting he responded: That sounds like my statement… To it I’d just add that it’s fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders. That must mean something, but I’m not sure what.Yeah, why would people comment so much on how the one (adolescent) woman character would spontaneously decide that the best way to keep the group connected is to have the boys run a train on her, in 10 excruciating pages of detail. King has always been incapable of writing women and It was the most egregious display of that.
“King has always been incapable of writing women”
Sure.
The difference King is ignoring is that the child murders are presented in a negative light. The child orgy is presented as a glorious and empowering thing.
It was not addressed, which…yeah, that’s fine!
You don’t want to blame it on cocaine but, you know, cocaine.
Cocaine is a HELL of a drug.
I got an underage sewer gangbang notification for this?.
“Not a great trope, but dude’s written close to 100 books, so that’s about 2%.”
Also, it wasn’t a trope when he used it one time 40+ years ago.
Whaddya mean “symbolic blood and flesh”?! That’s microaggressive!
I was raised Methodist, and we only used the real thing.
But why you didn’t have too that was the whole point of the speech that his blood was wine and body was bread
That’s only in Pre-Crisis continuity.
But the New testament 52 restored it.
“Clift addresses why the burial ground trope, usually dated back to the publication of The Amityville Horror and featured in King’s Pet Sematary and The Shining, exists to invent, distort, and mystify actual Indigenous practices”I’m not sure if Clift is intentionally or unintentionally messing this up but King’s use of the trope does not exist for those reasons at all.
I’m going to go with ‘intentionally misunderstanding the text for clicks’ on this one, because it’s pretty obvious that King uses the trope to chastise white people for taking Native lands and slaughtering them.
“Intentional misunderstanding” is the softest way to put it. I’d call it “lying for clicks”.
I don’t know why McCarter wrote that; Clift’s video does none of those things. It’s about 55 seconds of jokes like “Italy looks like a disembodied foot! That’s scarier!”
There was also a neat short story with a Chinese immigrant burial ground in it. I thought it was The Phantom Blooper by Gustav Hasford but that is not it. I can’t remember the title or author, sorry. Similiar story but it takes place in the Pacific Northwest, a few Vietnam veterans at night in that cemetery. Damn good story.
Also, native burial grounds stories predate King by decades. Hans Holzer wrote of a house close to one and also a site of a early 1700s massacre. The haunting is blamed on either one of these, or a combination thereof. The way I heard the story from a local, Hans bolted from the place after only a half hour there with his medium and would never come back again. lol
I am pretty sure Solomon Kane encounters a few for sure
Gosh, I hope he turns his eye to other dated works from 50 years ago and tries to mine money and clout from sneering at ‘em.
“Tribe” is not exclusive to native culture. Not everything is a micro aggression.
There’s literally an entire period of European history—the Migration Period—about Germanic tribes (described as such) running rampant over post-Roman society.
Right?? I totally wanted Cleveland’s baseball team to use one of those rascals as their new mascot!
“especially when European burial grounds, like the Paris catacombs, and accepted religious rituals, like the Pope ingesting symbolic blood and flesh, have the potential to be so much scarier.”Because Catholicism and catacombs have never existed in horror at all.
You can’t expect everyone to have heard of obscure, niche genre films like The Exorcist and The Omen.
As Above, So Below is a good one that actually filmed in the catacombs.
[LATIN CHANTING INTENSIFIES]
On the other hand, Episcopalianism is really ignored in the horror genre despite its similarity to Roman Catholicism (minus the Pope and with priests that can be married and even be women).
It’s the pageantry. Say what you want about Catholicism, but you can’t beat it on pageantry.
“Why doesn’t this author whose work is almost exclusively focused on the American Northeast pay more attention to the catacombs under Paris?”
The French are snooty, and refused to put any catacombs in small town Maine.
Also, Catholics don’t believe it’s symbolic — it’s Protestants that think Communion is symbolic. But whatever, it’s not like Clift’s video is arguing for a more detailed understanding of cultures other than our own or anything.
I guess you could say(puts on sunglasses)it was unsubstantiated
I can’t wait for what he has to say about Star Trek Voyager.
There are loads of horror stories and movies set in the Vatican.White characters born in rural Maine during the Great Depression would call them Indian Burial Grounds.It’s probably easier for an American author writing primarily for Americans in America to write about Indian burial grounds than Parisian catacombs.Indian magic isn’t used to make IT more scary. It’s used by the heroes to help defeat the monster.Calling the Pope a vampire or whatever is way, way more offensive to way, way more people than plonking the Overlook on an Indian burial ground.
Other than the implicit suggestion that the horror is some spiritual retribution for colonial genocide, I’d guess there’s also a healthy amount of “noble savage” mythologizing happening in King’s stories.The white people in, say, Pet Sematary are presented as crass and selfish children who despoil sacred things, while The Natives are contrasted as wise caretakers who wielded cosmic power responsibly. Circa the 70’s/80’s, it probably felt to King like a progressive position, to suggest the arbiters of proper morality were actually indigenous.I suspect he also had/has some egotist impulse to create a North American mythology in his wider canon. He’s said he imagined The Stand as his Lord of the Rings, and probably had similar ambitions for The Dark Tower. So, the pitch to center his stories in Europe probably sounds unappealing for that reason, too.Not to invalidate Joey Clift’s point, though…it’s not exactly flattering to portray Native Americans as magical nature spirits with druid powers who exist apart from the modern world.
The white people in, say, Pet Sematary are presented as crass and selfish children who despoil sacred things, while The Natives are contrasted as wise caretakers who wielded cosmic power responsibly.
Maybe in the abstract, but the only named native guy in Pet Sematary was a drunk who took a kid up there (then-young Jud).
Yeah, they’re mostly absent save their traumatized and broken descendants, which is also a fun racist detail.But I meant, there’s the suggestion that the indigenous people who used to live there knew not to take this power lightly. The white people, lacking their respect for nature or whatever, freely exploit it and pay the price.The Ritual of Chüd speaks to something similar, I think. Only the Natives seem to understand what IT actually is or how to fight him. But because colonialism, this knowledge is now esoteric and obscure. IT has grown complacent feeding off spiritually defenseless white people.
Is this the literary version of the stand-up who asked “Why do people hate Guy Fieri”?
CANCEL STEPHEN KING!
A guy with a truck tried to do that once. King survived and wrote him into one of his books
That’ll learn ‘em.
They say he’s trapped in that book to this day!
If your stories are set in the Maine Woods, and you want a haunted place in the woods that’s been haunted since time immemorial, then it’s probably going to be a native place because they all were native places going back more than a couple centuries.
As far as Indian burial grounds, I count three titles being repeated: Amityville, The Shining, and Pet Sematary, two of which are the same author. Does that really constitute a trope?That said, spending a lot of time in northern Michigan as a kid, we were told/imagined that every interesting hill in the woods was an Indian burial mound. So I feel like it’s more a cultural trope than a cinematic or literary one.
Here you go, a quite comprehensive list:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IndianBurialGround
Despite the name, that list isn’t all “Indian” burial grounds. They are simply “Thing X was built on the site of Y”. It includes Star Wars, for Pete’s sake.I don’t point this out to defend the trope. It’s offensive and should go away. Singling out Stephen King for using a 150 year old idea in a fifty year old book seems just a bit wide of the mark.
Well yeah, but it also includes the ones that are, which is the point.
My point is, even on that list, it isn’t that many. It’s a bad, offensive concept, but it’s also not one that’s used much anymore. By all means, call it out, but maybe find it in something more relevant (IT is relevant, granted, but I don’t even know if that was King’s fault rather than a choice for the movie).The more interesting part of that list is the “Real Life” section, detailing instances of actual desecration of actual burial sites.
“IT is relevant”
The ritual in IT is *NOT* based on anything Native American.
“two of which are the same author”
Stephen King’s The Shining does not have an indian burial ground.
Poltergeist used that had a non-native graveyard.
Clift, who you may recognize from contributing to The A.V. Club in the pastI don’t know how I managed to miss that one, but I’ll be charitable and assume that I was just really busy at the time and not assume that it was buried under a deluge of listicles and clickbait.
Note to the AVC: this kind of unique article is exactly what you need to prioritize. Lists, endless reiterations of the same story (I think we got a piece on the whole “Scorcese has an opinion on Marvel movies” deal just last week, which is well past its shelf date), links to other site’s work, carved-off pieces of previously published articles (I’ve seen AVC do this with interviews)—it’s all filler. If you want something that will drive people to the site, you need to offer them something that can’t be found elsewhere, something that makes readers want to come back.To be fair, I have noted a slight uptick in long-form pieces, though most are in the “For Your Consideration” mold (even if not actually under that subhead), which, to be honest, don’t always have a lot of meat on the bones as far as content. I’ll still take them over more filler, but I do feel like you have to offer a larger thesis beyond “here’s a thing I noticed in pop-culture”.
I am a fan the “Lets Play” podcast(at the time it was still called “How did this get played?”) and listening to that episode without any warning was brutal. Clift was all nice and happy and then it was like “So about this terrible game?” and Clift just ripped into them. To be fair to Heather, Nick and Matt, they did not try to silence him or defend themselves. They took it and apologized and hopefully it was a learning moment for everyone. I suspect its one of the reasons the show changed format away from just playing terrible games and maybe indirectly has had a lot less guests on the show since then.
I remember that episode. The hosts did handle it well by not getting defensive and actually listening. Plus they had him on a later episode.
“Note to the AVC: this kind of unique article is exactly what you need to prioritize.”
Yeah, we definitely need more links to unresearched, completely ignorant videos made by utter hacks.
especially when European burial grounds… have the potential to be so much scarierEr, like… graveyards…?I haven’t done the digging, but I think that trope might have shown up a few times across horror fiction (and King’s work), too.
Honestly, I find microaggressions an underrated garnish.
Poltergeist is 100% innocent of any of these tropes.It’s Poltergeist II that you’re looking for.
Yeah, Poltergeist was about a regular-old non-native graveyard — “You only moved the headstones and left the bodies!” Pretty sure headstones weren’t a thing in ancestral native graveyards.
King’s books only get out of Maine maybe half the time, they don’t exactly trot globe. This guy thinks he should start setting shit in Europe?
accepted religious rituals, like the Pope ingesting symbolic blood and flesh
Wait, you realize that according to Catholicism it’s literal blood and flesh, right? That’s like Catholicism 101.
The insertion of Indian burial grounds in The Shining wasn’t even in King’s novel. It was only in Kubrick’s adaptation.So that just leaves Pet Sematary, which never had a generic “Indian burial ground” description in the novel. It was mentioned to be a Mi’kmaq tribe burial ground.But I do understand that it might get frustrating to have your people portrayed as mystical shamans just because they aren’t white. Just a little weird to specifically call out an author who only wrote one of the two things you pointed out 40 years ago.
That was hilarious and my enormous crush on Román Zaragoza remains.
Someday we’re going to save the world by picking apart 40 year old stuff on the internet…
There … isn’t a Native American burial ground trope in The Shining. At all. I’ll give them “Magical Negro” in The Shining and The Stand, and Native burial grounds in Pet Sematary, but that’s not what the Shining is about.
also, magical negros are hilarious
Did King actually put this trope in The Shining? I don’t remember it in the book, only in the Kubrick film, and there’s been plenty of discussion about how different they are from each other.
When you recommended me this Stephen King book, you forgot to tell me one little thing: you didn’t tell me that it was set in an ANCIENT INDIAN BURIAL GROUND..WELL THAT’S NOT MY RECOLLECTION…He said he mentioned it five or six times.
I appreciate the point of the short, but to be that guy:
“Comedian and writer Joey Clift makes a case for ditching a stereotypical horror setting found in several of King’s books”
Several? More like two, the ones mentioned: Pet Sematary and The Shining. BUT…the Indian Burial Ground thing in The Shining is something Kubrick added for the movie. It’s not in the book. And Stephen King hates the movie.
So…out of 70 books he’s written, one does not “several” make.
Are you seriously implying graveyards and catholicism aren’t used enough in horror? Seriously?
Fuck this was stupid.The majority of King’s horror universe is centered squarely in a gothic Americana and European centric mythos.King had nothing to do with Amityville Horror which was written by Jay Anson.And what little King sourced from invented indigenous supernatural elements are rooted in the fact that colonial Americans caused a genocide.In fact it’s a fantastic relief and to his creative credit that King chooses to undermine Christian ideas of the supernatural with a deeper older more pagan idea of the supernatural. The christian supernatural is just christian propaganda and reinforces idiotic simplistic ideas.
King primarily writes stories set in the USA and the USA’s history does not have many other cultures that might be spooky. If he grew up in France or Germany then he might plumb the ancient rites of the Gauls or Germanic tribes… But he isn’t, so you’ll have to put up with him for a few more years.