Vera Miao’s horror film ‘Rock Springs’ is rooted in Asian American history

Living in the United States means accepting a high likelihood that your home abuts mass graves and murder scenes. Our nation is sculpted from Indigenous genocide and the routine exploitation of migrant communities; the shops we frequent, offices where we work, and playgrounds where our children gambol may also be places of historical atrocities, paved over to afford us the fulfillment promised in our Bill of Rights.

Vera Miao wrestles with this uncomfortable truth of American identity in her feature debut, Rock Springs, a horror film rooted in Asian American experience and those grim aforementioned histories. In keeping with a key theme of contemporary Asian American horror cinema, Rock Springs draws on culture and folklore for mortar and the past for plot. The title references a Wyoming city where, in 1885, Chinese miners were slaughtered by white miners armed with rifles, tools, and the same xenophobic grievances providing fuel for white supremacist fervor today: the latter group believed jobs in the surrounding coal mines were being taken from them by the former group, and voiced their accusations via sadistic violence and property destruction.

Kelly Marie Tran as Emily in "Rock Springs."

Courtesy of Sundance

Officially, 28 Chinese miners perished on that day. Miao’s pre-credits postscript states that the death toll is likely higher. None of this matters to her protagonist, Emily (Kelly Marie Tran), because none of this is known to her as she moves to Rock Springs with her young daughter, Gracie (Aria Kim), and her mother-in-law (Fiona Fu), whom Emily only addresses as Nai Nai. The relocation is spurred by the death of the family patriarch, Wayne (Leslie Kwan), Emily’s husband and Gracie’s father. Gracie hasn’t spoken since his passing and Nai Nai only speaks to Emily in Mandarin, which Emily, who is Vietnamese American, doesn’t understand; these dual frustrations combine with grief to tax Emily’s mind. Her struggles to hold the family together aren’t helped by ghostly visitations from Wayne, whether in bed or at the dinner table.

Rock Springs breaks its family and historical dramas into three chapters: “Gracie,” “Uncle Brother Nameless,” and “Emily Emily Emily.” The first and third focus, respectively, on Gracie and Emily, while the second time warps the audience back to the day of the Rock Springs massacre, introducing Chinese miners Hoy Yat (Ricky He), Tse Choy (Cardi Wong), He Yew (Jimmy O. Yang), and the uncle of the group, Ah Tseng (Benedict Wong), whose lack of a queue immediately symbolizes his efforts at assimilation. Wong is fresh off a supporting role in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a film likewise structured with a chaptered narrative, while Yang rarely gets to play characters this down to earth and humble. Together, the pair make terrific sense together as audience anchors. We recognize them and know their work, and this familiarity gives Rock Springs’ period reenactment additional gut-punching heft.

One might argue no such enhancements are necessary to convey that the 1885 killings were, in fact, awful. Nonetheless, the casting choices facilitate the segment’s bleak stakes and their ramifications for the film’s present-day plot. Miao complements Rock Springs’ explicit tragedies, the massacre as well as the paternal loss, with the implicit tragedy of unawareness. For Emily, Gracie, and Nai Nai to settle in town knowing what brutality befell Chinese migrants who lived there during its late-stage frontier era is one matter; that’s a choice. But not knowing at all, and finding out about the slayings from Donna (Tanja Dixon-Warren), their well-meaning, guileless neighbor, strikes a sobering blow. What does it feel like when white people know Asian American history better than Asian Americans do?

Aria Kim as Gracie in "Rock Springs."

Courtesy of Sundance

Confronting the sins of this country’s past could easily tilt Rock Springs into the territory of elevated horror, in which genre is subsumed by pretense: instead of a horror film, Miao might’ve chosen to make a film about the United States. Rock Springs is about this country, certainly, but Miao embraces the connection between those sins, and that past, with the sort of visceral experience horror cinema provokes. The massacre sequence is a shock to the senses. Its consequences, for Emily and her family as well as their neighbors, inspire raw dread. Miao stitches together a literal monster from the forgotten dead, cleverly sidestepping over-determined metaphors about a long-buried wrong exhuming itself to roam Wyoming’s hinterlands and dismember unsuspecting hikers. Horror films easily suck all of the air out of the room when they deemphasize the qualities people watch them for in the first place: skeletons, spirits, and haunts, embodied in Rock Springs by a polymelous abomination derived from John Carpenter’s The Thing and well-deployed gore effects.

Miao holds the full expression of her genre trappings in reserve. This is fine. The payoff to Rock Springs’ deliberate pacing is worth waiting for, in part because Miao devises an effectively gnarly monster (though one that would’ve benefitted from a higher ratio of practical to digital effects work), and in part because the movie still works as a historical drama. If filmmakers attempt the exercise Miao pulls off here, her approach is the right one: give the audience a good period piece married with a good horror story, where the conclusion is an intersection of alienation, ignorance, unspoken misdeeds, and outrage carried from bygone centuries into the modern day.