The Moment You Lock Eyes: Haunted Nature

This text analyzes the forest, and particularly the haunted forest, as a colonizing space within which a gradation of aliveness in material representations is used to affirm and solidify nineteenth-century imperial structures in updated narratives. After considering how ghosts relate to a material presence within new materialist concepts of sentient landscapes, the analysis turns to popular horror narratives to demonstrate how haunting is used for settler colonial purposes to lock bodies marked as Indigenous into a questionable concept of Nature in order to separate this space from culture even and particularly when claiming to account for past atrocities.