Alien monsters: Niamh Gallagher, ‘Indigenous monsters and the spectres of assimilation: Jon Bell’s The Moogai (2024) as Aboriginal Gothic’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Alien monsters: Niamh Gallagher, ‘Indigenous monsters and the spectres of assimilation: Jon Bell’s The Moogai (2024) as Aboriginal Gothic’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 2025

28Dec25

Abstract: John Bell’s recent feature film The Moogai (2024) marks the entry of Aboriginal Gothic and Horror into twenty-first century mainstream Australian and international cinema. Working alongside and beyond current frameworks of Aboriginal Gothic, monster studies, and haunting, I argue that the monsters and spectres within the film can be understood as emerging from different world-systems, troubling Western conceptions of monsters and ghosts as purely metaphorical sources of fear. I also argue for an archipelagic understanding of Aboriginal Gothic texts, in which texts engage in an expansive and dynamic set of articulations which foreground the localised nature of Aboriginal relationships to place and space. Monsters borne from Country, and Ancestral ghosts, are connective and reparative, as they signal practices of care and mutual responsibility embedded in systems of Kinship, Dreaming, Lore and Law. The past and ongoing violent impingements of the colonial nation, particularly the Stolen Generations and hyperincarceration of Aboriginal people within the prison system, haunt Aboriginal life through the imminent threat of disappearance, and gaping absences of those disappeared. Within the film, Bell explores the interface of these two worlds, creating a titular monster which is both deeply tied to Bundjalung Country, and respondent to the horrors of colonialism.

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