[Editorial] Disability and Horror: Introduction

Within the world of horror films, disability representation has had a fraught history, but one I’ve paid careful attention to all my life. I was born with a rare disease that took half my hearing, half my vision, and half my face. As a child with a birthmark that enveloped the right side of my face and forced my right eye closed, I never saw people that looked like me anywhere in the world. I also couldn’t identify with the images I saw of people with symmetrical, unblemished faces. One fateful night though, the babysitter from across the street came over with her boyfriend, some weed, and a VHS of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I looked at Freddy Krueger and finally saw myself. I was only three, but I knew then I was the monster. A year later, my father let me watch all of the Universal Monsters. I never saw myself in the victims. I saw myself in the Phantom of the Opera. From narratives about disfigurement and monstrosity, I learned early on in my life that I would most likely only ever see myself represented in horror films. 

Around the same time, my parents introduced me to the film Mask (1985), hoping that I’d receive some kind of positive message about where I fit in the world. The message I received was that society needed me to be some kind of saint to feel comfortable with the way I looked. The term “inspiration porn” hadn’t been coined yet, but that film was a perfect model for every film that dehumanizes people with disabilities by creating narratives that say that they are heroes because of their adversity, who belong on pedestals. I know that the same people who looked away when I turned to face them and never met my gaze were the same people who over time learned to suppress this urge for the more socially acceptable version of believing stories of inspiration and sacrifice. By putting me on a pedestal, they still never had to look me in the eyes, never had to recognize my agency or my humanity. Needless to say, I rejected this portrayal of the perpetually sweet and kind and inspirational Eric Stoltz in Mask in favor of the monsters, embracing them as my representatives of trauma, the avatars of my righteous anger at the world. 

As time has gone on, my identity as a disabled person has grown and changed, as has my identity as a horror fanatic. As I began to suffer problems related to mobility, cancer, and heightened chronic pain, home invasion horror began to hold a special fascination. The idea that anyone can take over your surroundings and cross over into your personal space felt like what I was enduring any time I went out in a wheelchair, and someone came too close, or hung a bag on the back of my wheelchair. It also felt like the violation inherent in permitting other people to help me with daily tasks. I wanted bodily autonomy and I didn’t have it. My body was the house, invaded and taken over by too many entities at once. The horror of a home invasion narrative never comes from the moment of real violence, it comes from that moment when the threshold is crossed. My personal boundaries felt meaningless, but watching the barriers broken and then restored in horror movies restored my sense of order, if only temporarily.

As I acquired hearing aids for the first time, amongst other medical devices, my relationship to body horror became much more personal. The other was now a part of me, something I had to assimilate into myself and rely on to survive. I began to watch films exploring themes of medical or mechanical augmentation, such as the Tetsuo the Iron Man series or Meatball Machine (2005). In these movies, I found my fears and fantasies perfectly expressed. What new form of monster was I becoming, and what kind of control would these new devices wield over me?

As new neurological conditions required me to have more and more spinal taps and surgeries, extreme horror became the closest I could come to validation of my lived experience in the outer world. The shocking nature of films like Martyrs (2008) became a source of comfort to me. I saw in the story of Lucie and Anna a portrait of my anguish but also a representation of what I saw as the transcendental nature of pain. I regarded my body as nothing more than a broken vessel in those moments of recovery, and found it all too easy to dissociate entirely. The only way I could feel and fight the deadening of the senses was to seek out the most gory, the most disturbing, the most gut-twisting and nerve-shredding horror I could find.

Through every aspect of my disability, I have found horror to be the only genre of film that gives me the catharsis I need, that represents my experience, albeit usually in metaphorical ways, and gives me the emotional tools I need to carry on with my day. At the same time, representations of disability onscreen have evolved considerably within my lifetime. No longer do I need to look to the same monsters with the same disfigurements as my only frame of reference for my own identity as a disabled horror fanatic. 

In future editions of this column on disability in horror, I will be analyzing a variety of horror titles from different eras and countries that integrate disabled characters and/or important narratives about disability in their storytelling. My purpose here is not to debate every aspect of the overall merits of the movies I discuss as a whole. This site has many brilliant reviewers who can offer that commentary in detail. Instead, I intend to explore each title’s disability representation, what it means in the conversations within the disability community, and how it reads on a larger scale, as it is received by a global society still battling with many aspects of ableist ideology.

I’m enormously excited to dive into this research project with you, dear reader, where I will be looking carefully and eagerly at any feedback you provide as it continues. I hope you will log on for my first official column, which will run next month, when I discuss A Quiet Place Part 2 (2020) in depth. Until then, do good work and keep in touch.

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