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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Ellen E Jones

‘We wanted to kick in the doors’: the Indigenous film-makers reinventing horror

Rob Collins as Tyson and Shantae Barnes-Cowan as Shanika in Firebite.
Rob Collins as Tyson and Shantae Barnes-Cowan as Shanika in Firebite. Photograph: Ian Routledge/AMC

In January 1788, a fleet of British ships under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip anchored in a bay known as Warrane to the people living there. What happened next is the familiar story of Australia’s founding. Less widely known is that 11 blood-sucking vampires were also brought ashore by the “First Fleet” that day. Once loose, they became addicted to the blood of Indigenous Australians and set about massacring the population, thereby weakening their resistance to the British invaders.

Or at least, that’s according to Shanika and Tyson, the vampire-killing “bloodhunters” at the centre of a new eight-part Australian series, Firebite. And who are we to argue?

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