Tai Leclaire Gets Haunted In His Upcoming Short Film, ‘Cheyenne’

Tai Leclaire. (Photo credit: Tai Leclaire)

Actor/comedian Tai Leclaire wants three things from you–to be scared, to laugh, and to think.

The King of the Hill star and Rutherford Falls writer is working on a new project, horror-comedy short film Cheyenne. As of writing this post, Leclaire’s Seed & Spark page shows that the film is close to hitting 60 percent of his $30,000 funding goal.

The film takes on stereotypes and asks what would happen if those tropes were turned upside down. As Leclaire wrote as his mission statement, “Stoic warriors, Ancient ceremonies. Cursed burial grounds. Native culture has been Hollywood horror’s lazy shortcut for decades. Cheyenne is done with all of it by raising a (sacred) middle finger to every tired trope and handing the narrative power back where it belongs: a Native filmmaker.”

Talking with Leclaire revealed more about Cheyenne‘s personal origins and why he feels taking on these tropes is so important today.

Leveling the field

 Leclaire said that Cheyenne stems from his love for horror.

“I very much grew up watching horror movies. I just grew up sort of obsessed with the spooky, the supernatural, anything of that genre,” he said.

Watching tons of horror, however, exposed him to the trope of the mysterious Native American person in horror. Native Americans are often shown as having created the curse that establishes the horror story, or are guides or shamans for the main characters to learn more about the ghosts and spirits at play.

Leclaire said he would watch “a lot of movies where you would see that trope being used over and over and over again to the degree where I was kinda wishing it was real [and] exact some revenge.”

“It was something that has just always been sort of in the pop culture zeitgeist, and there’s, you know, good and bad with the stereotype being used as a plot device in films,” he continued. “I guess the good being that it’s like, hey, we still exist, but the bad being that, like, whenever this trope is used, it cements us in the past. …So there’s frustration that comes with that and it was fun to explore. It was fun to take that idea and spin it on its head.”

With that said, there is a lot Leclaire is spinning on its head. Cheyenne is slyly addressing the very real horrors of living in a colonized society. For Black and Brown people, living in a Westernized country means living under constant siege. While many years ago, the siege was quite literal, nowadays, the battlefield includes the mind exposed to hundreds of years of colonization. As Leclaire states in his director’s statement, there’s a conversation people of color have about if their thoughts are their own, or if they are the result of colonized ideas.

“I think people need to take time to realize that,” he said. “A lot of us are living in our post-apocalyptic society. We are living in the aftermath of the near genocide of our people, and this is both in Canada and the US. As someone who is Native from a tribe that exists both in Canada and the US, raised in Canada, I was very much having to grow up dealing with two colonizers of my people.”

“I feel like my ancestors are always with me in some way or capacity because so much of our ethos revolves around future thinking and future generational thinking,” he continued. “As a Mohawk person, we practice [that] everything you do, you do in service of the seventh generation after you. …I’m wondering how my actions are influencing future Mohawks and… it’s sort of this never-ending chain between all of us.”

“It’s something I like to explore and I’m always curious about hearing it from other people of color, other people who have experienced colonization in different ways,” he said, adding that Cheyenne is “taking the piss” out of these tough conversations by affirming people or color’s humanity while finding the humor in the horrific reality of living under colonization.

“I’ve always been, in my professional life, and even in my personal life sometimes, the only Native person in the room, the only Native person in the space,” he said. “And what I would consider insane questions or insane observations I got from people [were] a big catalyst for making the story. I want to flip the table and be like, ‘Well, what if you’re the only one there? This is what it feels like to be the only person in the room.'”

“I feel like it’s a concept and a thought that I think predominately white audiences just don’t get to tackle in a comedic way. And it’s not coming from a place of pointing fingers. It’s coming from a place of just leveling the field a little bit in terms of letting folks know that the world is bigger than they think it is.”

“You gotta do a Subaru joke.”

The origins of Cheyenne came from the Upright Citzens Brigade (UCB) Theater. His character, which he debuted in 2019 for UCB’s Halloween show, was a shaman who is distressed because he’s haunted by the spirits of white people.

“I was always floored by the reaction it would get,” he said. “These were things that were deeply personal to me that I thought were funny, and the way in which audiences took it and were receptive of it was a little shocking because I was like, ‘Oh, I thought I was the only one that could see this thing, that could understand this thing.’ But it turns out, it’s a rather shared experienced. And it’s funny.

Even during the workshopping phase, Leclaire was shocked by how excited other writers were about his character.

“I was like, ‘I really wanna do something spooky. I wanna do something with vein.’ I was like, ‘You know, I really hate this Indian burial ground thing. I’m just tired of it,’ only because, yes, there are Indian burial grounds, but there are also a whole lot of us who are alive,” he said. “That’s where it began and it blossomed, but I remember [when I asked the other performers], ‘Okay, what are some, like, quote-unquote white things a white ghost would do?’ And then everyone who was on the team, which was 80 to 90 percent white performers, were like, ‘It’s gotta be this. It’s gotta be live, laugh, love. You gotta do a Subaru joke. And I was like, ‘Oh, shit. Okay, like, this is great.'”

“I was even more surprised by the reaction from the white audience, who were on board with it and having a blast. So it felt like a nice way to introduce this concept to audiences who are not Native and let them be a part of it instead of ostracizing them for it.”

He’s also not coddling anyone either. While Cheyenne does have something to say about life as a Native person, Leclaire’s not trying to hand-hold audiences through the basics of racism.

“I’m not here to do 101. I am not here to be a history teacher. I am here to share a story that is deeply personal to me. It is my point of view, it is very much written for this younger version of myself and I think it’s in specificity that things become universal,” he said. “The amount of movies I’ve watched with the token, stoic Native American trying to explain what it is to not pollute the water, like common sense shit. [I’m] just like, ‘Yeah, don’t be a dick to your surroundings. I don’t know what else to tell you, man.'”

“I don’t know if you’ve been able to see I Love Boosters, but Boots Riley has a moment where he presents the concept of passing, but he doesn’t do it in an explainy way. He does it in a comedic way that is fast and to the point. …When comedy comes into it, it sort of makes it easier to digest, ironically. It makes it easier to play with and call out [the tropes],” he said.

Comedy also makes it easier to call out personal experiences, such as Leclaire’s experiences as gay and alternative within his Mohawk community.

“It’s very much about a guy who has been ostracized from his own community, who’s trying to find his own community,” he said. “I grew up gay and goth on a reservation. I know what it is to stand out in a community that’s already standing out. So I very much wanna take that ethos and instill it into this protagonist for Cheyenne.”

“…I know I’m not alone in that experience, and that it is complicated, it’s messy, but at the same time, there’s a sense of pride in it, and there’s, like, a sense of pride in myself,” he continued. “Despite feeling ostracized from my community some ways, I was never not proud to be Mohawk. I was never not proud to be Mi’kmaq. I was never not proud to be an Indigenous person. But we need room for that nuance and that space in between, because life is not black and white, you know?”

Hollywood’s changing focus

Cheyenne comes at a time when Native storytelling is at an all-time high in Hollywood. The new avenues for Native creators leaves Leclaire feeling “incredibly optimistic.”

“I feel very good about what’s been happening lately in terms of both Native film and television,” he said. “With TV, you got Dark Winds, Reservation Dogs, Rutherford Falls…you have stuff for kids, [like] Spirit Rangers. On the movie side, you got just a wildly large group of directors making incredible stuff. You got Erica Tremblay with Fancy Dance. You got Frybread Face and Me. There’s so many movies that are getting their moment in the sun finally.”

“I understand that the history has regressed in the last two years with this current administration, and that a lot of executives and people who are in charge on the development side are a little wary of Brown and Black stories again. But we naturally persevere,” he added. “I don’t see this slowing down. I think we are still going. We’re still gonna make our movies, we’re still making our stories. I personally feel like I’m done waiting for the industry to show up and I’m just excited for everyone else to make their things and the industry to find them versus us trying to go towards the industry. I am going to continue going forward regardless of what the industry or some person or some producer says because what else would I be doing? What else would we all be doing?”

Thankfully, Leclaire doesn’t have to do it alone. Cheyenne and Leclaire have support from the Sundance Institute.

Leclaire called the institute’s support “incredible.”

“I pinch myself every time I realize I have a part of Sundance with me, because it was something I was striving for for almost all of my career,” he said. “The Sundance Institute itself is so incredible at putting their money where their mouth is and really helping Indigenous artists across the board.”

Leclaire’s connection to the institute comes from Sundance’s Native Labs program.

“I know it was a big part of Robert Redford’s ethos with the program [and] with Sundance as a whole,” he said. “They’re just champions of artists and they really give you the space to create what I feel like other organizations may steer you more towards what the quote-unquote ‘market’ wants.

He said Sundance’s artist-first focus and support “has been detrimental” in getting Cheyenne off the ground.

“I can sing their praises all day,” he said.

Cheyenne‘s place in horror

Cheyenne will be a part of the ongoing conversation horror has with addressing social issues. Of course, horror’s relationship with commentary isn’t new. But in recent years, horror has had an uptick in films addressing issues like racism, discrimination and classism, with Jordan Peele being considered as our time’s new master of horror.

But, Leclaire said that Cheyenne‘s place in that conversation depends on who is watching, and what they deem to be “commentary.”

“I think the first way to go around it is [to ask] who decides that it’s social commentary? Who is the one that decides that? Is it from the director, or is it from the critics, or is it from the audience?” he said.

“I think ultimately the North Star for me for that question is who am I making this movie for? And I have my laundry list of people, but at the tippy top, it’s I’m essentially making this for 12-year-old me,” he added. “I am making this for something that I was like, if I was in eighth grade, seventh grade, middle school, was hungry to watch a movie that would make me laugh, that’s something I can connect to on a personal level, that is what I’m trying to do with this film. And I think the horror comedy space just lends itself naturally to the story. It lends itself naturally to the genre which we’re subverting, and I think it’s a fantastic space to just explore these themes without a border around it. It’s really a space we could really just play in the sandbox.”

For Leclaire, horror comedy “can act as a Trojan horse for some of these social issues,” even though he admitted that when he wrote the film, he didn’t mean for it to be a film focusing exclusively on social commentary.

“It kinda came out of the fact of, ‘Wouldn’t this be funny? Wouldn’t this be a funny thing to laugh at? Isn’t it time to turn the laughs around and face it that way for a little bit?'” he said, adding that Shaun of the Dead is one of his favorite films for how it subverts expectations.

“It’s very much a buddy comedy about best friends, and it’s sweet and it’s tender, but it has those moments of horror and graphic violence,” he said. “I just feel like both these lanes lend space for the viewer to reflect on their own experiences via those tropes.”

You can learn more about Cheyenne and donate to the campaign at Seed & Spark. You can also visit cheyennefilm.com and check out @cheyenne.film on Instagram and Threads.