Girl power crushes shame and alien-infected polar bears

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/06/2022 (1213 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The new Canadian horror film Slash/Back may recall a certain horror classic from 1982 in which a remote polar outpost finds itself under attack by a shape-shifting alien of evil intent.

But rest assured, Inuk director Nyla Innuksuk was not aiming for anything like John Carpenter’s gory/slimy classic, The Thing. If any movies from the ’80s inspired her, it was more like Steven Spielberg’s more benign alien invasion movie from that same year, ET: The Extraterrestrial, or perhaps Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985), both movies featuring kids riding around on bicycles and encountering outsize adventure.

“I grew up obsessed with movies as a kid and as a teenager,” says the Toronto-based Innuksuk, 35, in a Zoom interview with the Free Press from her parents’ home in rural Ontario. “Movies like ET and The Goonies, where these kids what kind of go off on adventures that was something that I always really loved,” she says, copping to the fact that, when she went on her own childhood adventures with her brothers and friends, she was “humming that ET theme song in your head.”

But what those movies failed to reflect was Innuksuk’s own childhood in Iqaluit, the capital city on Nunavut. Hence Slash/Back centres on a clique of young girls in another Arctic town, the Baffin Island community of Pangnirtung. Their adventure takes them into the path of a dangerous, strangely gnarly polar bear, which turns out to be even more deadly than usual, as its body has been taken over by serpentine alien parasites capable of invading other bodies.

“When it came to make my first feature, I wanted to make something that was like one of those (adventure movies) but in the environment that I knew,” she says.

In the film, the girls are obliged to rescue their entire community from the invasion force. The burden falls especially hard on Maika (Tasiana Shirley), whose father has taught her traditional hunting skills, but who is nevertheless ashamed of her Inuk heritage. The character embodies common feelings in Indigenous communities that need to be confronted, Innuksuk says.

“There was this period of time where people were made to feel really ashamed of their Inuk-ness and their indigeneity. Our language was banned and people were punished for celebrating their Inuk-ness,” she says.

“And these kids are the grandchildren of those people,” she says. “These are their aunties and uncles that have had these experiences happen, so there is this layer of shame in our indigeneity and that is something that we have to work through as we get older, if we’re going to be proud Indigenous people.”

● ● ●

When it comes to sheer drama, you could have made a film about the making of Slash/Back, given that Innuksuk was in desperate need of a liver transplant when she first pitched the film at the 2016 Toronto International Film festival. That September, “I was told I had a 50/50 chance of surviving the month, that was when I was really sick,” she recalls.

“And I was like: Wait a minute, I haven’t even made a movie yet.”

A successful transplant in 2017 meant she could fulfil her childhood dream of making movies.

“I’m really grateful for having been sick,” she says. “It was definitely stressful.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but having done this crazy and challenging thing, I came away knowing I’m capable of doing hard things,” she says.

“So I put myself in the ring in a way that maybe I wasn’t able to before,” she says. “Life’s short and I want to be able to do this thing.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

Twitter: @FreepKing