Horror film Blood Quantum brings the plague to the white man

What would happen if a zombie virus only affected white people? That is the question that Indigenous Canadian director, writer, producer, editor and composer Jeff Barnaby asks in his new film Blood Quantum, which dropped on April 28 on horror streaming service Shudder. What makes this zombie tale unique is that it takes place from the perspective of an Indigenous community living on a reservation just outside of Quebec in the early 1980s. The twist? The inhabitants of the Red Crow Mi’gmaq reserve are immune to a zombie plague that appears to have decimated the rest of Canada. Traylor (Michael Greyeyes), the tribal sheriff, must protect his son’s pregnant girlfriend, apocalyptic refugees, and reserve riff-raff from the hordes of walking white corpses.

The elder, Gisigu (Stonehorse Lone Goeman), who happens to be Traylor’s father, is the first to sense that something is terribly wrong when fish he has caught and gutted mysteriously start reanimating and attacking each other. Things escalate rapidly from there, as more and more people begin to exhibit cannibalistic behavior. Traylor’s son Joseph, (Forrest Goodluck) and his best friend and half-brother Alan a.k.a. “Lysol” (Kiowa Gordon), are the first witnesses to the human strain when they spend a night in jail for being drunk and disorderly, and their cellmate attacks them. Traylor intervenes…