Kaniehtiio Horn on Ritual Torture in Directorial Debut ‘Seeds,’ Biting

With Seeds, Canadian Mohawk actor Kaniehtiio Horn has embraced the indigenous horror-thriller genre — with some added comedy.

“I didn’t want to make a trauma movie,” the Reservation Dogs actor tells The Hollywood Reporter about her directorial debut, a genre-bending home invasion film she wrote, stars in and produced. And she wants her world premiere audience at the Toronto Film Festival to laugh.

Heartily. And in the right places. Horn says laughter abounds in indigenous culture and communities — however varied are the tribes and language groups. That’s especially laughing with, and not being laughed at: “Oh my God, we are funny! We can make fun of each other, but it’s always in a teasing way. It’s always in a loving way.”

And before writing the Seeds screenplay, Horn never considered jumping into the director’s chair. But after playing the Deer Lady on FX’s Reservation Dogs and Tanis on Hulu’s Letterkenny, Horn got tired of waiting for someone to hand her a leading role.

“I really wanted to show I could lead a film,” she says. Fellow Canadian Jacob Tierney and other friends soon put her doubts about directing her own script to rest. “It felt like everybody else believed in me more than I believed in myself. So I was like, ‘okay, I’ll direct it too,’” Horn adds about Seeds, where she originally envisioned her character, Ziggy, battling a bad guy intent taking some corn and bean seeds from her family home.

“I just wanted to make a dumb stoner movie. And then it turned into what it means if you truly dissect what those seeds mean. I didn’t intend that to happen,” she says. In Seeds, Ziggy, a thirty-something Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) woman, starts out as an online influencer in the big city promoting Nature’s Oath, a seed and fertilizer company. But that’s before Ziggy is called back to her reservation by a happy-go-lucky cousin, and where a spotty Internet connection for the social media diva feeds into early laughs.

“At first I was going to be home alone, then what are the bad guys trying to get? Well, it would be kind of funny if they wanted some seeds. And then it was corn, beans and squash seeds, because that means a lot to my people,” Horn recalls.

Eventually, the seeds Ziggy is supposed to protect had a totemic power as they came to represent her family’s indigenous legacy. And fighting to protect the seeds was about discovering her inner warrior.

All of which has Seeds as Horn’s directorial effort ultimately conveying a deeper message about family amid evil from Big Ag corporations, and all folded into scenes that include ritual torture and cannibalism.  

“I had the torture scene in there because it’s something I’m interested in,” Horn adds, having recalled research for her role as Mari in the 2020 Nat Geo show Barkskins, an adaptation of Annie Proulx’s book of the same name where the Iroquois tribe in 17^th century Quebec tortured and killed their enemies. “We are a peaceful people, but if we are pushed to the point that we have to defend ourselves, we will be vicious,” she explains.

But back to Horn’s original ambition to leave Seeds viewers laughing at TIFF. “All these very meaningful things kind of came out, but not on purpose. I look back and, damn, I only added the eating-the-heart scene in one of the last drafts,” she recalls.

Of course, Reservation Dogs as a comedy had its fair share of conflict and tragedy as it focused on indigenous peoples, culture and communities. In the FX series, Horn plays Deer Lady, the vigilante protector who chases and punishes bad people and whose underlying rage is revealed in a celebrated third-season episode set around the violent past of residential boarding schools in the U.S.

Horn’s rage is mostly contained in her depiction of the Deer Lady, but is revealed far more openly by Ziggy in Seeds. “There was a moment when I was editing my movie, and the Deer Lady episode had just come out, and the [actors] strike was on and I remember sitting on the couch with my editor at her computers, and I said to her, ‘I think I have a lot of rage inside of me.’ So she turns around and says, like, ‘You think?’”

All of which coincided with Horn writing the script for Seeds as an emotional cathartic release. “This rage I have inside of me, I think I’m acknowledging it now. And it’s coming out in a healthy way. And by making art, by making these characters and, while maybe I was afraid of it all before, now I’m accepting of the rage I have inside of me. And yeah, I just really wanted to do a torture scene and I like biting,” Horn reveals.

As for how TIFF audiences react to Seeds, Horn hopes above all else that they have a good time: “I want people to know going in, you’re allowed to laugh. This is a comedy. You don’t have to be all serious watching this.”