Papers by Isaiah Frost Rivera
The Impossible Shot: Race, Genre, and Spectacle in Jordan Peele’s Nope, edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Russell Meeuf, and Nancy McGuire Roche, 2026
In this chapter, I argue that a serious consideration of Jordan Peele's film Nope as a Black quee... more In this chapter, I argue that a serious consideration of Jordan Peele's film Nope as a Black queer ecohorror offers interpretative possibilities that challenge the stultifying logics of anti-Blackness, cisheteronormativity, and settler colonialism. Building on scholarship in Black and queer ecologies, I position Jean Jacket as a biologically indeterminate nonhuman subject whose actions generate affective and ethical modes of resistance. I argue Jean Jacket’s octopoidal form and habits stem from a righteously
predacious ecological agent opposed to intervention in the natural world,
weaponizing its spectacular visibility to countersurveil and counteract the
capitalist interlopers exploiting its pneumatic habitat. Through this reading, Nope’s characters emerge not as blameless victims of foreign consumption but active participants in the sociopolitical milieu Jean Jacket, by virtue of its desire to be unseen, affirmatively resists. Their efforts to tame, train, and vanquish Jean Jacket reveal the extent to which racially and sexually marginalized people, incentivized by capital, participate in their own annihilation for individual profit.
Not quite folk: The inhospitable landscapes of North American found footage folk horror
Horror Studies, 2026
This article outlines a hybrid strain of found footage and folk horror cinema that confronts the ... more This article outlines a hybrid strain of found footage and folk horror cinema that confronts the violent histories of Black and Indigenous (dis)possession undergirding North American geographies, expanding the conventions of what Dawn Keetley terms ‘folk horror without people’, wherein geopolitically fraught landscapes exert a non-human form of agency onto their human inhabitants. Within this tradition, I locate an emergent trope of folk horror antagonists I collectively term ‘not quite folk’ in order to encapsulate the human-but-not-quite human beings that enact violence within such narratives on behalf of US American landscapes. In what follows, I offer close-readings of three recent North American found footage folk horrors – Howard’s Mill (2021), Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva (2023) and #MissingCouple (2024) – each of which features not quite folk who, as proxies of the isolated US landscapes from which they stem, retaliate against human interlopers and subvert the widesp...
Horror Studies, 2026
This article outlines a hybrid strain of found footage and folk horror cinema that confronts the ... more This article outlines a hybrid strain of found footage and folk horror cinema that confronts the violent histories of Black and Indigenous (dis)possession undergirding North American geographies, expanding the conventions of what Dawn Keetley terms 'folk horror without people', wherein geopolitically fraught landscapes exert a non-human form of agency onto their human inhabitants. Within this tradition, I locate an emergent trope of folk horror antagonists I collectively term 'not quite folk' in order to encapsulate the human-but-not-quite human beings that enact violence within such narratives on behalf of US American landscapes. In what follows, I offer close-readings of three recent North American found footage folk horrors-Howard's Mill (2021), Horror in the High Desert 2: Minerva (2023) and #MissingCouple (2024)-each of which features not quite folk who, as proxies of the isolated US landscapes from which they stem, retaliate against human interlopers and subvert the widespread exploitation of settler colonial intervention on US ecologies.
Speculative Nonfiction, 2023
What does one do when language fails to express what fire does to the body? Scream? Sit in silenc... more What does one do when language fails to express what fire does to the body? Scream? Sit in silence? Speculate. But speculation is not a method, nor a cure. It is a wish; the kind you make with your eyes closed, expectant, knowing that, no matter the outcome, you have made the concerted effort to blow that fire out. In this piece, I wish for another kind of light, via three cultural reference points: the discovery of the element helium, the Greek myth it takes its name from, and the lynching of a disabled black man in Texas whose death was photographed, souvenired, phonographically reenacted and commercially disseminated for over a decade. I wish for a different dispersal of Henry Smith's death, because I believe Dionne Brand and Christina Sharpe when they tell us to defend the dead. I wish for a new passage of death, a funeral rite, a ceremony for men like Smith, like myself, whose mythologies have been irrevocably bloodied by the imperialist settler-colonial history of the United States empire. I wish to honor the stories of those to whom history cannot—will not—pay respects: the genocided, the deracinated, the ostracized, the always-already unmade masses. It is up to us, the inheritors of that explosive light, to tend to those fires and those graves. This is our debt. This is my attempt.
Horror Homeroom, 2023
Though his interest in ecohorror is largely attributed to the notoriously maligned The Happening ... more Though his interest in ecohorror is largely attributed to the notoriously maligned The Happening (2008), M. Night Shyamalan's films often position the natural world in stark and vengeful opposition to the ravages of human indifference, implicating his characters in the large-scale destruction of planet Earth. Shyamalan's films present a uniquely faith-based optimism about such catastrophe, a thematic throughline that takes root in their deployment of children as more environmentally aware than the adults around them, who are unable, or unwilling, to secure a future for their successors in our increasingly apocalyptic times. This essay examines two of Shyamalan’s recent adaptations of contemporary ecohorror novels; Old (2021), based on Sandcastles, written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters, and Knock at the Cabin (2023), based on Cabin at the End of the World by Paul G. Tremblay. By altering these novels and their polarizing endings in pursuit of a redemptive politic, Shyamalan resists pandemic-era despair in favor of a dogmatic certitude about the ecological future of humanity.
Horror Homeroom, 2023
Though often excluded from the found footage genre, mockumentary horror films offer a fascinating... more Though often excluded from the found footage genre, mockumentary horror films offer a fascinating look at how contemporary found-footage media consistently reestablish and redefine horror conventions through innovative storytelling techniques. Two independent films by first-time horror directors that embrace this generative quality are Savageland (2015) and Butterfly Kisses (2018), each a chilling, genre-bending mockumentary horror that reveals the disastrous consequences of suppressing local and global histories. Although their contents—and creatures—vary, these films utilize similar narrative elements such as technological manipulation, supernatural folklore, and infection in order to complicate our engagement with digital media in the metamodern age. They also push the limits of how found footage grapples with social violence and domination, since the transgression of conventional narrative structure reflects the potential transgression of the settler colonial nation-state.
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Papers by Isaiah Frost Rivera
predacious ecological agent opposed to intervention in the natural world,
weaponizing its spectacular visibility to countersurveil and counteract the
capitalist interlopers exploiting its pneumatic habitat. Through this reading, Nope’s characters emerge not as blameless victims of foreign consumption but active participants in the sociopolitical milieu Jean Jacket, by virtue of its desire to be unseen, affirmatively resists. Their efforts to tame, train, and vanquish Jean Jacket reveal the extent to which racially and sexually marginalized people, incentivized by capital, participate in their own annihilation for individual profit.