Beyond the Veil: Genre hybridity, cultural specificity and anthology media in Aotearoa New Zealand

The Aotearoa New Zealand television anthology, Beyond the Veil , offers stand-alone horror and supernatural shorts from Māori, Sāmoan, Filipino and Chinese New Zealand storytellers. Focusing on the Sāmoan found-footage horror episode ‘26:29’ and drawing from internal government agency documentation, this article suggests that the state-funded series leverages the strengths of short-form storytelling, and the unique textual features of the anthology format, to offer a playful, often pointed counter to dominant (i.e. Pākehā/New Zealand European, Anglo-American) cultural and horror narratives, while creating much-needed opportunities for culturally responsive stories and production practices. These concerns are contextualized within an account of genre-led storytelling and the emergence in recent years of the anthology form as a powerful political site of Indigenous, immigrant and diaspora-led filmmaking practice in Aotearoa New Zealand.