This post may contain a few things which are spoilers for those who haven’t seen various movies, so I’m going to fill up the beginning with some text so people who use the mouseover feature won’t get screwed.
Tacos. Tacos are great. They are crunchy and tasty all at once, and they may also combine meaty and cheesy as well. Tacos are simple; any idiot can make a taco. Tacos are flexible and fun for the whole family; got a vegivorian in the family? Shovel some refried beans into that taco instead of meat. And then, of course, you can customize your taco and add salsa, sour cream, and, the holy grail of taco goodness, guacamole. Mmm mmm, tacos sure are good.
Okay, that should be enough text. So I just rented (modern remake of an older movie, knowing which movie I’m talking about will let you know it has something to do with dead Indians. ) The Amityville Horror, and thought it was rather deriviative of The Shining. But that’s neither here nor there. It turns out that a large bit of the movie’s plot revolves around a wackjob who tortured Indians to death in the basement of the house. Essentially causing the house to have bad juju forever.
This got me to thinking, how often is that device used in fiction? What’re the variations on the theme? (eg. torture instead of a strict ‘burial ground’?) And most importantly, what was the first work of fiction which featured that setup as a plot device? And, I suppose, how often are they ‘based on a true event’? I tried running a google search, but I came up with nothing useful.
I know this has been used enough that the phrase “ancient indian burial ground” is, itself, a cliche. IIRC, the movie Poltergeist had them situated atop one of them pesky ancient graveyards. But that can’t be the first movie to use that plot device, can it?
It would seem to me that the ancient burial ground theme is just a variation of the ‘bad stuff happened here and the ground is now cursed’ theme… perhaps mixed in with some stuff about how the Native Americans had magic, or something of the sort. It also seems somewhat similar to the curses placed on Egyptian tombs, in that those who violate the sacred space can expect some spooky shit to go down. So, I’m also curious if any of these types of stories existed before king Tut’s tomb was discovered and brought Egyptology (and curses) to the public consciousness. I’m also curious why these stories are told. Werewolf stories often focus on our ‘darker’ sides, zombie movies on our ‘mindless’ side, vampire movies on our fixation with eros and thanatos, etc… What’s the source of the ancient burial ground stories? Is it, perhaps, a system of taboos about death and respecting corpses?
So, any takers? Surely someone must know the arts better than I?
I think they’re just a special case of the 'to their dire peril, they foolishly ignored a stern and/or obvious warning" theme; of which, say, Jurassic Park (‘they meddled with things they should have left alone’) is another variant.
It’s an old theme in America, especially among ignorant rural whites, to believe that Indians were sorcerors with occult powers. There used to be a backwoods American concept called the “Indian sign” which was some sort of hex or curse. I’m curious to know how that folklore got started.
The K-13? You don’t wanna go down that run. That run has got a history. Thirty-five people have died goin’ down it, and some say you can still see their ghosts up there. It was on that very ski run that a group of students were killed by a wolfboy who escaped from a mental institution. You see, that ski run was once a burial ground to a tribe of vampire wichicaw who ate the flesh of children with no eyes. Yeah, a lot of history on that ski run.
It was used at least twice in South Park. Once, very recently, in the episode with the girls’ secret Fortune-Telling device, and once quite long ago that IIRC involved KoRn, the band.
Obviously the ritual of burial in consecrated ground, and the associated ritual of burying only at crossroads outside consecrated ground, came about because people were worried that the spirits of the offended dead would wander and take their revenge. And those are just the Europeans versions. Every society has its own version of the wandering dead who aren’t treated properly.
The Indian burial ground is really just another version of this same universal belief: that the dead will wander and seek revenge if they aren’t treated with respect. In some societies that respect is simply that the bodies aren’t to be disturbed, while other cultures feel a need to placate the dead with offerings or celebrations. But the result of disrespect is always the same the dead come back into the world of the living and try to kick ass. That may be through bad luck in Shinto societies for example, or in the form of literal walking corpses in Hindu or Haitian cultures.
The incorporation of Indians into this universal belief Indians seems to be obvious and unavoidable (with my powerful 20.20 hindsight). Particularly unavoidable given the shift in perception of late 20th century American culture WRT Indians. The 60s and 70s saw a very public change from Indians as ‘hostile marauders’ to Indians as ‘wronged noble savage’. So America moved form Western Indians being chased off by the cavalry to the “Crying Indian” and cheesy fake pronouncements by Seattle, inspired in no small part by the beatniks and flower children.
So what better way to adapt this ‘wronged nobility’ into popular culture than by tying it into an existing universal mythology? We have a universal mythology that when the dead aren’t shown respect they will seek revenge. And in the traditional Indian we have a group that is effectively extinct and that we accept was shown great disrespect. Since Europeans have a history of showing no respect for Indian cultural practices it’s logical they would have no respect for burial practices either, it’s an easy point to sell. Added to that there was already a strong cultural belief that the original Indians had a good reason to want revenge on Europeans for ‘destroying’ their country. And so the story pretty much writes itself.
It’s going to depend a lot on how liberally you choose to interpret “Old Indian Burial Ground”. As you point out, this is really just a variation on the ‘unsanctified/desecrated burial ground’ theme, and that theme goes back to the year dot.
There are any number of stories about people being buried without proper ritual, or the ritual being later disturbed and the spirits rising to wreak revenge. There is the legend of the Princes whose ghosts are seen wandering the Tower of London for example, partly because they were murdered and partly because they were buried (illegally and without ritual) in the tower. That story certainly predates King Tut’s tomb by centuries. But that of course isn’t the earliest such legend, and as I said above the idea that the dead would return if they weren’t treated properly was well known around the world and has been since people arrived.
Of course there are endless versions of “Hamlet” or “Child of Glass” where murder victims wander the place of their murder. But that is fundamentally different to the offended dead concept, since the spirits in those cases have risen because of acts committed on them in their lifetimes.
Why movies are made and why the legends began are probably two separate things. Vampires for example started out as more ghostly and less powerful than post-Dracula vampires and seem more to do with nameless, insubstantial, creeping horror than anything erotic or desirable. The eroticism element was originally filled by Incubi and Succubi, which were later merged with the vamps. Similarly early werewolves were almost always willing participants. The 20th century idea of werewolf-as-leper/victim is something very different to the original.
The same is probably true of the ‘neglected dead’ myth. It probably started because primitive cultures are animist. All things have a spirit, but humans have a spirit and a personality. If the personality liked to associate with is family and hated certain things when it inhabited the body then naturally it will want those things when it’s dead. Thus rituals evolved to ensure the dead wouldn’t return to trouble the living and would move onto the afterlife. And of course if, after lengthy rituals, someone blunders into a burial cave without permission or neglects the peace offering then it’s all undone. So various myths evolved that the dead weren’t to be disturbed and were to be treated with respect. Even after religions got more ‘sophisticated; the basic mythology remained.
The 20th century version, like the vampire and werewolf myths, has produced a totally different creature. The dead aren’t just angry because they have been shown disrespect. The dead are angry because their culture has been shown disrespect. As a popular belief this is a purely 20th century phenomenon. Earlier civilisations were proud that they had slaughtered the original inhabitants and stolen their land (read your Bible if you don’t believe me). But in the late 20th Century western culture became widely adopted the idea of the noble savage. The idea that these previous people were more deserving of the land than we are, that they had been tremendously wrong, and that they would be tremendously upset at what we had done with their land. So it’s no longer the dead being pissed off because the rituals haven’t been maintained. The dead are pissed off because the whole culture and land has been desecrated.
Just as vampires have been transformed into pornographic monsters and werewolves into raging addicts the offended dead have been transformed into the vengeful spirits of “The Environment” or “The Society” itself. It’s a seamless melding of several late 20th century concepts: A western culture with no respect for the environment, prepared to live anywhere with no thought for what was destroyed to make that lifestyle, A decadent white man who either has no respect for or actually hates Indians. And a country that has been despoiled either physically or culturally or both and that needs to be avenged.
So it’s not surprising that these stories usually seem to focus on Indian burial grounds. Dead Indians are the ideal eco-warrior. It’s harder to make an avenging Earth spirit out of a dead European. The one exception I can think of is the “Final Fantasy” movie. But if anything this is an even more extreme version. In that the entire planet is haunted by the ghosts of an earlier planet that was blown up (in a war IIRC). And the ghosts aren’t just Indians, they are animals. In that case the despoiled paradise was an entire planet, and the avenging spirits of the Earth were the animals themselves. It’s the wide-screen, technicolour version of the Indian burial ground.
Besides the aforementioned Poltergeist, other flicks/books with the idea of Indian Burial grounds are The Amityville Horror
Pet Sematary.
The idea that Indians were somehow devil=worshippers had, I think, roots in the beliefs of the early settlers, who figured that anything other than their brand of Christianity was evil, and the thjeme percolated down to modern films. I suspect modern Algonquin and Lenape don’t take to kindly to a film like The Manitou, where the titular supernatural creature is a deformed and evil being, quite the opposite of Indian beliefs. the film has to have roots in the Lovecraft canon, because one of the characters is “Misquamacus” (Tony Curtis’ character mockingly calls him “Mixmaster”), a name first appearence in one of Lovexcraft’s stories, and used by others writing in his mythos, especially August Derleth. For the record, I don’t think that Lovecraft believed that all Indians were devil-worshipping evil folks, but the idea that alien cultures have links of their own to Ancient Evil, just like Western magicians, has a great appeal and resonance, so Lovecraft took it and his followers used it. I don’t think they had Indian burial grounds in their own mythology, but they did talk about Indian sites for dark ceremonies, including, I suspect the [place now known as Mystery Hill/America’s tonehenge in New Hampshire. (Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi doesn’t thin so, but a lot of others do think there’s an association there).
<Homer> Hello, [realtor’s name that i forgot] when you sold us this house, you neglected to mention that it was located ON AN ANCIENT INDIAN BURIAL GROUND!!!..really, oh…well that’s not my recollection, goodbye [hangs up phone]
H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shunned House” (1924) deals with a house that’s haunted because it was built on the former site of a graveyard. I don’t think it was supposed to be an Indian burial site specifically, but it’s been a while since I read it. Lovecraft probably based his story on a legend that was making the rounds by at least the 1890s. In the earliest known version, it was a house built on an old Dutch burial ground in Schenectady, N.Y.
[nitpick]The ghosts in “Poltergeist” aren’t Native Americans. The graveyard is a christian, presumably filled by predominantly caucasian corpses. Recall that Richard Dreyfuss’s character learns of the former existence of the burial ground when he is discussing a possible new development on another graveyard - filled with christian-style tombstones.[/nitpick]
I think the origin of the cliche actually was the original book, The Amytiville Horror, which was originally sold as a “true story” and contained a claim that the real house was really built on an Indian burial ground (It was not. The entire book has been soundly exposed as a hoax). Poltergeist popularized the idea even more. I think that other than those two moves, the idea is now used mostly as parody.
An irony is that I grew up on a farm in Alabama that was hellishly haunted and contained- guess what?- AN ANCIENT INDIAN BURIAL GROUND- and yet I can’t use something from my own past in a fictional retelling because it’s too hackneyed—
THANK YOU LUTZes and JAY FRIGGIN’ ANSON! (and your little pig too).
The only movie I can think of off hand that has an Indian burial ground (not ancient) as a plot device is the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson. He suffers quite a bit for trespassing through one, but it’s not because of the haints.
My understanding of Amityville Horror is that the house was perhaps a creepy place (I don’t know the real reason the Lutzes abandoned it after a month), but the notion of ghost pigs and voices and bleeding walls and all was actually cooked up by the Lutzes with Ronald DeFeo’s lawyer (who wanted to use the notion of supernatural evil to woo the jury- when you’re defending a guy who killed his entire family in cold blooded murder you clutch at straws). George Lutz, now hooked to an oxygen tank, still makes a large part of his living defending the book (and bashing the movies) on the personal appearance circuit.
In a slight variation, the book Sacred Ground by Mercedes Lackey has both good and bad dead Indians; Watches-Over-The-Land and The Devourer, aka The Evil One.
Wow! Somebody other than me has seen “The Manitou” (and admits it!)
Just a clarification, though: Misquamacus was only “a deformed and evil being” because of all the x-rays that were pumped into his reincarnated fetus. If he’d been allowed to peacefully gestate for the full period (oh, and kill Karen as well, but hey, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette, right? ), he would have been rather tall and impressive-looking. Probably still evil, but that point was kind of vague. He was pretty pissed off about the radiation, the knives, and the other white men’s medicine mucking up his spiffy new incarnation.
BTW, Masterton takes this idea further with the sequels “Revenge of the Manitou” and “Burial,” which contain even more gory pseudo-Lovecraftian goodness. If you liked “Manitou” (and I highly recommend the book), you’ll probably like these two as well. Mixmaster shows up again in “Burial,” and, though it’s been awhile since I read it and I don’t remember for sure, I think he’s much more physically imposing than he was in “Manitou.”
Interesting! Thanks everybody for the responses, I didn’t think I’d get anything quite that good to chew over.
And, Blake? That was pretty damn awesome, I haven’t taken a folklore class since my sophmore year of college, thanks for the info!
:smack: Why oh why did I think that? It’s been too many years since I’ve seen it. (mental note: Always, always, always consult IMDB before posting 'bout movies!)
I can’t remember who said it, but a native Canadian comedian pointed out that the whole damn country is an “Indian burial ground” if you really think about it.
