Wolf Inventory is a hybrid film project and haunting about ghosts,
sexual violence, queer femmes, and the South.

Our original intention for the piece was to make a discrete short film
with a group of collaborators, but the ongoing pandemic disrupted that.

Instead, our process—weekly Zoom meetings; performances for and with each other;
short fragments of video we each made in our home; text and photography—
became itself what we were working towards. 

Now—like a ghost, like kudzu—it sprouts rhizomatically.

Wolf Inventory isn’t finished, but we wanted to present it in its/

unfinishedness

(hauntings never end).

Instead, it continues. It endures.

A picture of hair clippings. We see two bare pale feet standing on tile flooring, surrounded by and partially stepping over curling dark brown locks of hair, cut off with a pair of shears, forming cresents across the floor.

“Ghosts are never innocent: the unhallowed dead of the modern project drag in the pathos of their loss and the violence of the force that made them, their sheets and chains.”

– Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters

But why haunting?

Haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide. Horror films in the United States have done viewers a disservice in teaching them that heroes are innocent, and that the ghouls are the trespassers. In the context of the settler colonial nation-state, the settler-hero has inherited the debts of his forefathers. This is difficult, even annoying to those who just wish to go about their day. 

Erasure and defacement concoct ghosts; I don’t want to haunt you, but I will.

-Eve Tuck and C Rees, A Glossary of Hauntings

“I get this ache. I thought it was for sex, but it’s
to tear everything to fucking pieces.”

-Ginger Fitzgerald, Ginger Snaps

“In our contemporary world the word (were)wolf is associated almost exclusively with the lurid, the sensational, the incredible, the criminal, the irrational. No rational human being today believes that it is physically possible for a human being to be metamorphosed into a wolf, or into any animal for that matter. (Even sex changes within the species require surgical procedures.)”

-Charlotte F Otten, Werewolves in Western Culture

“Ghosts hate new things.”

-Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church