Final Girls Berlin Brain Binge 2026: A talk by Alex Hall
Alex Hall’s talk, “Nature Girls on Native Land: Unsettling Lesbian Settler Horror,” examines a small but growing cycle of contemporary horror films she’s identified as ‘lesbian settler horror.’ These films frame white, gay women against deeply colonized landscapes, complicating the presence (and erasure) of Indigeneity onscreen.
While notable in their depictions of hyper-visible queerness in genre cinema, the critical response to these films often fails to acknowledge how lesbian survival relies on the capacity to unsettle native land. This talk will situate and frame this small cycle of films within feminist, Indigenous horror studies, revealing and unsettling the hallowed grounds of contemporary queer horror.
What Hall is most interested in exploring is the decolonial and queer potential of the inhospitable and discomforting presence of unlikely non-human realms pushing against homonormativity within the natural world.
Ultimately, this talk asks: What does it mean to attune to new forms of feminist and queer worldmaking as they emerge within the spectral presence of the natural world and in opposition to the lesbian settler on native land?
The lecture will be held in English.
More information about the lecture: https://www.finalgirlsberlin.com/2026/brainbinge/talk1
Information about the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival: https://www.finalgirlsberlin.com/
Alex Hall
Alex Hall is a writer, dog walker and PhD student based in Toronto. With a background in cinema studies, her interdisciplinary, theoretical research focuses on screen ecologies, horror studies, (counter) archives, and the burning aesthetics of the queer female body in moving-image art.
She is also the creator of Lezzie Borden (@lezzie_borden), an Instagram archive dedicated to queer women in horror.
Her work has appeared in Somatechnics, Monstrum, Xtra, the collection Recasting the Bygone Witch and is forthcoming in MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, and the collections Cinema and Posthuman Bodies and Weird Sisters: Psychosis, Persecution and Empowerment in Witch Narratives.