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On October 13th of this year, the horror filmmaking world lost one of the brightest lights to have recently emerged therein with the sudden early death from cancer of Jeff Barnaby at age 46; rendered all the more tragic by his having only 2 years earlier ‘broken out’ on the world stage as a filmmaker of note as director of the groundbreaking horror feature “BLOOD QUANTUM” – a zombie thriller set among a First Nations tribe in Canada that was the first horror film by an Indigenous North American filmmaker to feature and center a predominantly Native cast.
While we considered incorporating this compilation of an original “BIG PICTURE” episode and the review of “BLOOD QUANTUM” from its release two years ago in this year’s Schlocktober event; we ultimately made the call that it might be disrespectful to group the late fillmmaker’s work alongside what was otherwise “so bad it’s good” material, and as such present the two-episode compilation here to you now.
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Friggin' cancer
A lot of my friends spoke about Jeff's passing. I was surprised mainstream or nerd culture didn't speak about it.
I saw Blood Quantum on shudder during the pandemic and thought it was a good zombie flick. Give it a watch if you haven't yet. Sorry to hear about Barnaby passing.
Real classy, Bob. A guy dies, and the first thing that comes to mind is, "How can I grift off this and make a few extra bucks because his name is in the news?"
Dude seemed really very cool but also very let down by the industry. I'm glad you posted this; otherwise I wouldn't have known. I ran an extremely small horror-podcast during lockdown with some friends and Barnaby was nice enough to talk to us on Twitter and listen to the a bit of the episode.
Fantastic way to memorialize a guy who gave us a fantastic bloody zombie-flick.
damn I had no idea this happened until today.
This coming out in conjunction with Knowing Better's "What is an Amerindian?" could not have been more perfectly timed.
Just found out that Blood Quantum is available on VOD over here. Looks like it's as good a time as ever to check it out.
Anyone going to tell him what blood quantum means?
So…I'm not trying to be a hater here. I though Rhymes for Young Ghouls was AMAZING! Blood Quantum…I enjoyed it. It was decent. But as a big fan of the zombie genre, I found myself annoyed by just how many genre tropes were in it. Especially one of the lazier ones. Avoiding excessive spoilers, I found it hard to believe that a settlement that had seemed so especially careful and survived so long…would just suddenly NOT be, because the plot demanded it. And the 'villian' of the peice going essentially over the top, illogically evil at the end? I found it lessened my enjoyment of what was otherwise a banging genre flick with a wonderful twist.
Andrew Vachss' comment about Charles Perry's Portrait Of A Young Man Drowning would apply here to Blood Quantum: "An amazing work, by a genius who died before he could add to it."
I know katana sword is cool and all but I would have loved to have cool spear action. Maybe it is race reductive but native Americans just gives me that image. Although old man with a katana blade is definitely my shit. Will watch this when I get a chance.
Hey Bob, director of BIT here.
Thank you for this video. This death has haunted me. As a person whose worked very hard and struggled through certain life circumstances (poverty, serious illness in my 20's) on microbudgets to crawl my way into getting a movie made only to have its theatrical canceled because of the pandemic, JB was somebody who I was very much rooting for, and was very impressed by, (Blood Quantum rips so hard) and felt a bit of a kinship with, though I didn't know him, and I wanted nothing more than to see a hundred more of his movies cause he wasn't done. Wish he got more coverage while he was alive. A truly terrible loss. RIP
Well this is not the best news to wake up to. The industry absolutely buried his death too which is not good.
He left behind a list of works that are more than anyone else could have done in his short time
But we'll always wonder what might have been
Thanks for the education on the arts and artist.
This is crazy. I recently watched Blood Quantum, remembering your positive review, the weekend before Halloween this year. Afterwards I went to its IMDb page, as I usually do, and saw that the director had justed died about two weeks before with only a handful of movies under his belt. When this video showed up in my notifications I expected something new to honour him, but I'll guess this will have to do.
RIP Jeff Barnaby