Despite horror being such a prolific genre, filled with bodies in various forms, it’s predominantly recognised from a very Western, euro-centric lens. The Melbourne Writers Festival seeks to confront this with the panel Burial Grounds: Indigenous Perspectives on Horror, as part of the Festival of Indigenous Stories. 

Led by Jessica Johns, the panel composed of her and three other authors: Alicia Elliot, Jasmin McGaughey and John Morrisey. Johns was incredibly eloquent, able to shift from wittily introducing the writers, to emphasising the importance of storytelling holding significant power in the world, but especially Indigenous communities. 

Horror, she said, has a “refusal to leave me”, and that sentiment could be echoed by everyone in attendance at the Wheeler Centre, who were gripped onto the fanaticism, fear and depth of the genre. It’s explored diversely; Elliot’s book, And Then She Fell, surrounds an Indigenous woman married to a non-Indigenous professor studying her people. In the scene she reads out from it, Alice—the protagonist—thinks she hears something in her newborn baby’s nursery. Elliot’s reading was animated as she switched voices, terror shaking in her parts as Alice. In the audience, a baby ended up crying almost perfectly on time, though completely unintentional, making all of us burst into laughter. Most of Elliot’s segments or responses throughout the panel would do the same—supported by her quick and lively humour; she answered that the most horrific thing in the story was not the spirits, but “the mother in law.” 

Morrisey’s Bird Deity is his debut novel, published this year. It’s a cosmic novel following protagonist David, who seeks to finally return home after plundering the ruins of an ancient alien civilisation, the ‘parasapes’ for over a decade. The speculative nature of his work aims to magnify the grimness of Australia’s colonisation, horror and domination tangling with one another. During the panel, he emphasised the bleakness that settlement and pillage can wreak on a community or culture. In his reading, the settlement consists of logging trucks, military barracks and bureaucratic offices surrounded by a fence; through David’s narration, the world becomes dark yet enigmatic, a trap that promises great riches but also despair.

Straying from the other two, McGaughey’s 2025 novel, Moonlight and Dust, is a young adult fantasy. Zillah, a sixteen year old Torres Strait Islander gets caught up in a whirlwind of high school parties where she discovers Moondust, an elixir that gives those who use it powers for twenty-four hours. McGaughey confessed that it wasn’t the book she wanted to write, but one that she felt she needed to. She highlighted the lack of Torres Strait Island and Indigenous representation in young adult novels, especially in the fantasy genre. McGaughey aimed to create a world that felt like the one that she grew up in, a fantasy world free from stereotypes or biases. In Moonlight and Dust, the horror manifests in the power the teenagers are given, which inevitably has a price. The teenagers are determined to make the world a better place, though ultimately, there is “too much in the end to do good with it.” 

In Bird Deity, horror is rooted in the characters’ alienation from one another and their ambivalence towards the environment. Johns asked, “what role does memory play?” when exploring this concept. Morrisey answered that alongside alienation, remembrance comes in colonialism, being forced to confront what’s lost, in its constant looting of memories and artefacts. The way to collect the objects of the alien civilization is through tearing them off their bodies, at times killing them in the process. David—and other characters—become desensitized to this violence. Morrisey highlighted that this commodification stems from the need to “want everything.” 

Similarly, in And Then She Fell, Elliot’s depiction of Alice’s relationship with her husband, Steve, features the same perpetual studying of her tribe. This manifests from an academic lens, the documentation of Indigenous bodies being the husband’s area of specialisation. His scholarship becomes slightly gothic, as protagonist Alice is repressed by not only her husband but also new motherhood, almost reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby. 

In Moonlight and Dust, McGaughey had a different response to the other two. Memory comes to McGaughey from the loss of cultural memory, she briefly mentioned. However, it takes shape in a much more positive form, through the role of community; unlike many YA stories with individualistic protagonists and absent families, she cites it as a central force. The novel amplifies the “sisterhood of being black” regardless of whether it's through blood, friends and community. 

The variety of the three stories mesh together incredibly well in conversation with one another and in dialogue with Indigenous voices inside of fiction. Elliot, McGaughey and Morrisey connect their ideas together, though each have defining features that distinguish their views on horror. While there wasn’t plenty of time to take audience questions, those asked by Johns were great in understanding the motivations behind all authors. Her final question asked is, “is storytelling a kind of excavation?” Each writer answered yes in their own way. Horror itself is a form of unearthing; Indigenous horror in particular seeks to expose subjugated histories underneath layers of captivating writing. We can only look forward to many more horror works, no matter how scared they might make us.