Horror has never been just about the scares and creatures that go bump in the night. It’s a mirror that reveals that darkest parts of who we are, but Indigenous Horror is much more than a mirror. It’s truth bearing its teeth and revealing its most brutal, primitive form.
Tiffany Morris is a writer who, with perfect brevity and clarity, understands what horror is and somehow manages to balance the brutality of truth with tenderness. Through horror, she has found the freedom to be violently honest in drawing the correlation between how bodies and land become battlegrounds under commodification.
In this interview, Morris keeps circling back to REVELATION and discovering what’s beneath the surface of what see and only think we understand.
Q. Your work is a masterful blend of horror, poetry, and speculative fiction. What does horror give you as a storyteller that other genres simply cannot?
Thank you, that’s so kind of you to say! I try to read widely – I cut my teeth on literary fiction during my undergraduate degree, and just assumed I would write in that mode. It wasn’t until I started bringing my passion for horror to writing that I found myself able to articulate some of the core truths about what I was feeling about the world around us – capitalism in decline, colonialism, climate change, and many other societal issues. It’s a genre that gives you a lot of space to be confrontational and visceral, to play with what is hidden and what is revealed in variations of intensity, and that’s a freedom I deeply value.
Q. You write about bodies, land, and survival in ways that feel both intimate and unsettling. How do you approach horror as a reflection of lived experience rather than shock for shock’s sake?
My favorite subgenres of horror include psychological and social horror, so I think it naturally follows that it’s entwined with what I tend to write. There is definite catharsis in shock for its own sake, but to me horror is functioning best when playing with obscuring and revelation- when there is a truth being confronted, when something is being uncovered and daring you not to look away. In terms of bodies and land, both are commodified so readily in our current political realities that writing about that objectification feels natural to me as a central horror of our society.
Q. How do Indigenous worldviews shape the way you build speculative worlds, especially when those worlds are fractured, futuristic, or on the edge of collapse?
In science fiction my stories tend toward utopianism – I love to imagine a decolonial society where landback and traditional knowledges merge with technology. To me it’s barely even speculative to write it- it remains a distinct possibility if we can wrest the future away from the grasp of tech oligarchs. I try to approach most things in life with Etupatmumk, or Two-Eyed Seeing, at work – a concept brought forward by Mi’kmaw Elder Albert Marshall where Indigenous and non-Indigenous worldviews work together to create a complete picture of reality. In the fractured or collapsing worlds I create, I think it’s looking more precisely at where the fractures have happened, and what has always existed in spite of it – in real life as in fiction, that example shines in the many instances of what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor calls survivance of our Peoples.
Q.Green Fuse Burning explores language, control, and resistance. What drew you to those themes, and how do they connect to conversations happening right now around power and voice?
As a writer and a bit of a linguistics nerd, I’m fascinated by the power and evolution of language. I was raised in a household where Mi’kmaw language was only used here and there – my biological father was fluent, but I didn’t live with him, and my stepfather was a Residential School survivor, so he was not a fluent speaker. This is why I consider myself to be reclaiming Mi’kmaw language rather than learning it. There has been a very real power in connecting to the teachings inherent to the language and also in seeing how it has been influenced over the centuries by our changing Mi’kmaw world. When you are able to articulate things in a formerly suppressed language, a broken chain becomes re-linked, and that itself can be resistance – but beyond that, too, it can be restoration and re-storying.
Q. Climate anxiety and ecological grief surface throughout your work. Do you see speculative horror as a way to confront what feels overwhelming in the real world?
It’s a big part of why I started writing horror! I think many genres are great for exploring those themes, of course, but the immediacy of horror provides a great possibility for expressing it through a character’s experience, even in the very build-up and expression of dread and even if that dread isn’t fully released. Climate anxiety and ecological grief are somehow everywhere and episodic all at once – something that can be drawn out through dread and then illustrated with a jolt.
Q. Your writing often blurs the line between the personal and the political. How do you decide what parts of yourself or your community enter a story, and what stays protected?
I try to only share what is personal to me – if I think there is any risk of cultural harm I won’t share it. Of course, it’s tricky with horror because you’re already talking about difficult subject matter and it’s impossible to gauge the comfort level of every reader. I was, for example, very worried writing a story with a suicidal protagonist when so many of our people and communities struggle with it. But I’ve felt that the taboo around it made me feel worse and more alienated when having that experience, so I tried to move forward with it in a way that allowed people a chance to decide for themselves if it was something they could handle. It was very important to me to put the content warning at the very front and to be candid about my own experiences.
Q. You’ve published across genre spaces like Uncanny, Nightmare, and Apex. How has navigating those platforms shaped your relationship with genre audiences and expectations?
I feel very fortunate to have worked with those publications and have felt that many genre spaces and audiences have been ready to welcome perspectives from voices that haven’t been highlighted as much in the past! For every reactionary decrying these shifts, there are more Indigenous writers and fans seeing themselves and other writers and fans experiencing something new, and that’s a wonderful thing to see as both a writer and reader in the space.
Q. Representation in horror and speculative fiction is still catching up. What does it mean to you to see Indigenous horror gaining more visibility, and where do you hope it goes next?
It’s been so amazing to see this uptick in representation, especially in horror, and I’m looking forward to more – I would love to see more anthologies of genre fiction from Indigenous writers, more Indigenous women in horror, Indigenous youth writing genre fiction, emerging Indigenous writers of any age being recognized not only for their brilliance but for the diversity that exists within our diversity. If I can do a wishlist: Indigenous horror video games, Indigenous horror theatre, Indigenous horror TTRPGs, Indigenous horror podcasts, you name it! Also I REALLY want to see a Chatha writer doing a screenplay for a Sinners spinoff featuring the vampire hunters.
Q. Many of your characters are navigating isolation, grief, or transformation. What draws you to stories about becoming, even when that process is painful or frightening?
I think people are always becoming and never finished – even in death, our matter becomes something else, and we are born into cycles of time, and the fact of our existence is undeniable, so this process of becoming is the work of being human. The horror space is one where we are welcomed to look at how that process is painful, but it is also where we can look at what, and if, pain transforms into something else – monster, revelation, Final Girl, or something else entirely.
Q. Looking ahead, are there stories, forms, or even collaborations you’re excited to explore that might surprise readers who know your work so far?
I’m working on an Arthurian horror novel right now and am currently obsessed with the possibilities of Indigenous Arthuriana! I also have a story in the Women of the Weird West anthology coming out in June 2026 – as a Fallout: New Vegas fan, it was a really interesting genre to work in. I love to collaborate on projects, so I welcome anyone reaching out if they have something cool on the horizon!
If this interview left you wanting more, good. Follow Morris’s work, track what’s next, and keep your eyes on the Indigenous writers pushing genre into new shapes.
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