Blood Quantum: The Real History and Zombie Reimagining of a Genocide

When I was back on my zombie kick, I advanced the idea that what zombie horror is really about is the terror of things that won’t stay in the past. Zombies are a way to think about history as something that will not, in fact, be done and dusted forever, but will come back to bite us in the ass. Or face. Or neck. Zombie films, since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, have been a way of thinking about cultural repression and mobilizing that repression—literally—as the walking undead.

Romero himself, in Night and the two that followed (Dawn and Day of the Dead), clearly parses out and marches through the long history of race-based slavery in the United States, along with the long history of wage-slavery and consumer-slavery. Every one of his major films from the 1960s-1980s has a black, male protagonist who—flying it the face of all odds—makes it to the end. Why? Because Black men have literally seen this movie before: they’ve been stalked, hunted, attacked and killed by pale-faced monsters who want their blood. Monsters who want to turn them from people into mere objects, into meat, into the walking dead. That’s what slavery was, on some level, and had been understood to be in American culture, since the era of enslavement produced the idea of the zombi in French colonial Haiti. And of course, both in the second and third of Romero’s films, he specifically highlights the Haitian origin of zombie ideology through the person of his black male protagonists.

But in the 21^st century, there have been other instances in which zombie art—or, rather, the idea of the undead—have been used to think through race-based violence in the United States. My favorite of these, for reasons I’ll get into, is the 2019 film Blood Quantum.

Blood Quantum is, on one level, a horror film about the infection of the world by a horrible, zombie-making pathogen. Almost everyone is turned into a zombie in the whole world. Except, as it turns out, the indigenous peoples of the Americas. They are immune to the zombifying pathogen. Their blood has a property in it that prevents transmission of the zombie plague to them and to their communities. For clarity, they can still be killed by the zombies, like if a zombie horde descends upon them and rips them to pieces; they just can’t be converted into zombies. Not immune to violence, only immune to the disease.

But there’s more to it than that, much more. The title of the film, Blood Quantum, of course, refers to the idea that you could measure and classify people as “Indian” or “white” on the basis of the quantum—or portion—of native blood that was in their body. It’s a concept historically deployed for racial segregation, but has more recently been used as a way of ascertaining whether a person has enough native blood in them to qualify as a member of a particular tribe, culture, or people. In either case, it’s a way of discerning whether a person is part of an in-group or an out-group.

Blood Quantum, of course, revises that idea so that it’s not about being in a social or racial in-group or out-group, but a biophysiological one, in which you are either protected from the pathogen (in-group) or not (out-group). So this idea of a blood quantum, with its long history of being used for racist purposes, has now become a marker for survival: if your blood is native enough, the zombies can’t make you one of their own.

I said that this film is on one level a horror film about a zombie-making pathogen, and of course, that’s true. But on another, deeper level, it’s about the genocide committed against native peoples in the Americas by European settlers. More specifically, it’s a riposte to the role that germs and viruses played in that genocide. When European settlers arrived, they brought—among other things—smallpox, measles, typhus, and influenza. Millions of native people were killed by diseases that the white colonists had immunity to in their blood. Virgin-soul epidemics ravaged North and South America, killing huge numbers of native peoples, because they had no immunity.

In Blood Quantum, of course, that logic is directly reversed: here, it is only the native peoples who have immunity to the novel pathogen. The white people are acutely vulnerable, and the pandemic is brutal and pervasive enough to wipe out all of mainstream white American culture. What remains is what the surviving indigenous peoples collect into the small, fortified communities in which they will now live. The tables have turned: it’s the indigenous people living safely in the fortifications now, and the whites left outside to die.

Except, of course, that the tables have not entirely turned. Because the tables almost never entirely turn on history: history just keeps coming at you, dukes up, spoiling for a brawl.

What the film ends up being about is the desperate and ultimately doomed effort of the indigenous people who are immune to zombification to keep themselves safe from the still very lethal levels of hostility and violence that the white zombies still have—even in their undeath. As I said, the indigenous peoples can’t catch the zombie disease, but they absolutely can be ripped limb from limb and eaten by the zombified whites. So the protection afforded by their quantum of immune blood, although very real in stopping the disease, is still not even close to full protection from the zombie threat. We’ll go through the film in some detail here, but—spoiler alert—the white zombies end up killing many of the main characters, and rather brutally to boot. So, history repeats itself, eats itself, reenvisions itself, and repeats itself again.

When the film opens, on Red Crow Indian Reservation in 1981, we’re watching an indigenous fisherman gut fish. After he pulls out the innards of one fish, the fish starts to move. And not just little death throes—it’s more like big, muscular, deliberate movements of the tail and body. Eventually, the fish flings itself off the carving table and onto the ground. The fisherman backs up in horror. Soon, all the fish—split open and gutted—reanimate spontaneously. Queue credits.

After the credits roll, we pick up with a native police chief, Chief Traylor (Michael Greyeyes), who receives reports from dispatch about some crazy goings-on at Red Crow: a “drunk white guy” trying to eat a bunch of chickens, and his own father being scared and needing help. The chief goes to see his father (Stonehorse Lone Goeman), who turns out to be the fisherman from the opening sequence. Chief Traylor sees the dead salmon jumping and moving—all bloody—in a cooler. He is, understandably, horrified. While he and his father plan to burn the fish, they discover that a dead dog has also mysteriously reanimated. So, in this film, zombification can happen to animals. And soon enough, we have our first human revenants as well—white people, every one. Soon, the medical clinic has run out of tetanus vaccinations because the EMS is getting “too many bites” that they need to treat, and the medical clinic is overrun by a deranged zombie.

Quickly, the movie braids in a sub-plot about miscegenation and reproduction. We find out that Traylor’s teenaged son Joseph (Forrest Goodluck) has impregnated his white girlfriend Charlie (Olivia Scriven); they’re at an abortion clinic, but decide not to terminate. In the next scene, we begin to get a sense of how dangerous that choice could be for them, when we meet another mixed race couple, the white female partner of which has just had an apparently severely deformed baby. When Traylor goes in to check on her, he finds her eating the baby; she had died in the wake of the delivery, and has now awoken as a flesh-eating zombie, one so distanced from its humanity that it eats its own offspring.

We’re not feeling so hot about Joseph and Charlie’s baby at this point.

The film then fast-forwards six months, to a future in which the white world has come crumbling down as the huge majority of the world population has been zombified by what turns out to be a waterborn virus, to which indigenous peoples remain completely immune. Red Crow reservation has been turned into a fortified refuge for the native people who are immune to the zombification, along with the white refugees whom they take in, and for whom they provide food and shelter. So, even though the white people have been destroyed by a viral plague, only a couple of centuries after they attempted to destroy indigenous culture using tools like smallpox blankets, the indigenous people in this movie still try to help surviving, uninfected whites; they try to take in the white survivors, those for whom a near-total annihilation of their people is new, theretofore unthinkable, event.

At this point, I want to slow down and think carefully about genre. Because, for sure, this film is a masterful exploration of the history of race-based genocide in the Americas. But it isn’t just that. It’s also, of course, ecohorror: literally, the water is the enemy in this film, vectoring the virus to the entire world population. This film, released in 2019, six months before the COVID pandemic brought the world to its knees, recognizes that ecological despoliation of the natural world can, has, and will release untold and terrifying new pathogens into the world. In that way, it’s absolutely in line with the ecohorror of all the virogenetic zombie films and shows of the 2000s: I Am Legend, World War Z, The Walking Dead, and the rest.

But in the context of Native American or indigenous history, that virogenetic ecohorror has plangently, brutally different resonance. Because, as many indigenous scholars and activists have pointed out, Native American peoples have already lived through an ecosystemic horror. The climate apocalypse that educated, privileged, white Americans are (finally) beginning to get worried about has been happening to indigenous peoples for hundreds of years. Ecohorror and, specifically, virogenetic ecohorror aren’t fictions to indigenous peoples, nor are they science fiction or furturistic drama. They are history. This film, which definitely is a horror movie, is also an inverted retelling of highly familiar indigenous history, when the native ecosystems of the Americas became poisoned with sudden plagues, causing massive, massive loss of life. As a character named Moon (Grey Farmer) puts it: “The earth is an animal. Living and breathing. White men don’t understand this. That’s why the dead keep coming back to life. Not because of God, because this planet we’re on is so sick of our shit. This old, tired, angry animal turned these stupid fucking white men into something she can use again. Fertilizer.” Just as Black men in Romero’s films are disproportionately able to resist the zombocalpyse because of their experience living in white supremacist America, so the indigenous people in Blood Quantum are disproportionately able to resist the zombocalypse because of their experience surviving a colonial ecoapocalypse, full of disease and the wasting of the land. The history of genocide functions as a crash course on surviving the zombie era. Of course, the indigenous immunity to the plague helps, too.

On top of that, this film innovates in the eco-horror genre because it makes not only the human population but also other mammals and even fish susceptible to the virus—as the opening scenes made clear. The fairly overt message is that capitalism’s predatory practices since the Industrial Revolution, which have resulted in the pollution of the water supply by this unleashed virus, aren’t just killing people, but turning nature itself—broadly construed—into a monster. Capitalism has broken the entire natural order, making it so that not only people, but also dogs and fish come back from the dead. The animal world has been zombified. Traylor’s dad says, “Just like the dog, just like the fish, the dead are coming back to life.” This line is delivered not in English—which is the predominant language of the film—but in Mi’kmaq. Why? Because these conversations have been had before, in this language and others indigenous languages: the natural world has been made hostile and unsafe to indigenous peoples by the inroads of white settlers.

Ok, so we’re in the fortified Red Crow reservation, six months on. Chief Traylor is informally in charge of the troops of survivors in the fortification, but it’s a tense job. His older son Alan, nicknamed Lysol—who was angry and dysregulated even before the zombocalypse—has only become more so. Joseph and Charlie survive, with Charlie now close to her due date. Food is in short supply, and surviving white refugees come to the reservation, looking for help; Lysol is generally opposed to letting them in, not only because they pose a real security threat to the surviving community of indigenous people, but also because he’s very, very angry—and why wouldn’t he be? This is the second time that white people have come close to wiping his people out.

Charlie and Joseph, on the other hand, are more open to the idea of helping people—maybe because Charlie herself is white. Traylor just wants to keep as many people safe and alive as possible. Which is hard, because, it turns out, the lake water is “dirty” with the virus, so the survivors have to source mountain water. Now, you might ask, why do they care, if they’re immune? The simple answer is that there are white survivors among them—including Charlie—and there are dogs among them. Traylor understands that if even one dog or one white person gets zombified, the whole population is at risk.

And indeed one white teenaged girl gains entry to the fortification by lying about her bite-status. We, the audience, know she’s bitten, and that she will soon transform into a zombie. None of the other residents of the fortification know. But eventually, they find out: she turns to a zombie while making out with Lysol. She bites off and eats his penis, in what is one of the most viscerally disgusting scenes in a generally disgusting film genre.

The penis-biting zombie’s name? Lilith.

For any who don’t know, Lilith is the name of a she-demon in late Antique Jewish texts. Lilith was, according to this tradition, the first consort of Adam, but she refused to “lie beneath” Adam during sex, instead preferring to have agency and autonomy in her sexual life. Because of her insubordination, she was banished from Eden—making way, of course, for Eve. But that’s not the end of Lilith. Lilith heads to the ocean—the water, where the pathogen in this film comes from—where she gives birth to a race of demons. The angels of the lord appear to Lilith, demanding that she stand down and accept God’s dominion. Lilith scoffs and promises to kill the children of mankind from there on out. Lilith is a baby-slaying, hypersexual demoness, whose sole purpose is to cut off the generations of mankind, picking off people’s sons and daughters, and interfering with men’s ability to reproduce. So, when the Lilith in Blood Quantum removes Lysol’s penis, that’s right in line with the Lilith tradition: she’s cutting off the race at its root.

In response to his own complete emasculation, Lysol decides to destroy as many survivors as he can. Lysol releases Lilith to wreak havoc on everyone, now that he is convinced that “the world is dead” and he has “no family.” This is the scene in which his bizarre nickname finally makes sense: he is the final, toxic agent who accelerates a brutal scouring, cleansing, and purging of all the people around him—native and white alike, indiscriminately. Including Traylor himself, Lysol’s own father, who, while dying, begs Joseph and Joseph’s mother Joss (Elle-Maija Tailfeathers), in Mi’kmaq, “Tell my grandchild big stories about me.” This request, uttered just as he’s overtaken by the zombie horde in the overrun fortification, is his last act of indigenous survival: knowing his body is going to die, he wants to live on narratively in the minds of the next generation. He wants to become history, part of an oral history of survival; he refuses to be silenced or erased.

But Lysol, still on a manic killing spree, has come to the entirely understandable conclusion that being part of history means being killed. “This goes back so much farther than that!” he insists, when Joss tells him that maybe everything can be repaired and the family can move on. He knows: living in history is living inside genocide. He’s had this point enacted on his body, when Lilith dismembered him and stopped him from having any kind of reproductive future. He tells the other indigenous survivors—who are now very, very few in number—that he’s set them free by allowing the killing to proceed apace. Free from what, exactly? Free, it seems, from history itself. Free to disappear into oblivion. Lysol wants exactly the opposite of what Traylor wanted; he wants annihilation of self, of language, of history, of story. On some level he wants to be what Moon described: fertilizer. And that’s exactly what he becomes when, soon thereafter, the zombies descend upon him and chew him all up, as he lies screaming on the ground, fertilizing it with his life’s blood.

Joseph, Joss, and Charlie end up escaping alone onto the lake on a rowboat. Charlie, who’s been bitten, gives birth to a baby girl, just before Joseph euthanizes her to avoid having her hurt the baby. (She asks him to do this.) Joseph, Joss, and the baby head off into the water—the dirty, plaguey water to which the baby may or may not be immune, depending of course on her blood quantum.

So this brutal zombie film, which envisions on the one hand a gruesome revenge on white settlers for the viral genocide they enacted on native peoples centuries earlier, ends with the far more bleak and all-consuming resolution that, if nature itself becomes the agent of the genocide—if water itself turns against us—there is no good survival outcome. There is no victory. We may be tempted to mine a more optimistic reading of the end—the baby lives, after all! But without a mother, she will have no milk, and we know Joseph is going to be very, very hesitant to give her water. As far as we know, the livestock of the world are polluted, dead, zombified, or gone. So no substitute milk, either. There is probably no food supply that her newborn body can tolerate. There is no survival in this zombie landscape, there is no “big story” to tell her about Traylor. History itself will end when Joseph, Joss, and she disappear into the earth. Fertilizer, indeed.

So, even though the indigenous people in this film get a chance at a reversal of history—this time, they’re immune and the white people around them are not—the history of colonial violence ultimately cannot be stopped, because the harm of modern capitalism has poisoned the earth itself beyond usability. Blood Quantum’s final dirge is that genocide is ecocatastrophic, and that ecocatastrophe is—always—a genocide.

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My book on horror, American history, and feminism, SCREAM WITH ME, will be published from Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in September of 2025! Please preorder here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scream-with-Me/Eleanor-Johnson/9781668087633