by Billie Anderson, Staff Writer

Body horror is gross, creeping, and bloody. Too much, for some viewers. Probably not enough for others. We all have bodies, and the entry fee of being embodied is the certainty—not the risk, the certainty—that eventually, something will go wrong with it. We will lose control of it, suffer large and small indignities, and at some point (at multiple points) have to redefine what it is to be ourselves as our bodies change in ways we can’t predict. Even when everything is working “normally”, there are still little horrors that we’ve all learned to welcome: pregnancies, painful growth spurts, aging.

That familiarity is what makes body horror such a visceral, overwhelming, powerful tool in storytelling. It gets a knee-jerk, gut-level reaction. It can open barriers between film and spectator. It can be transcendent, in its extremely physical reality. To accompany a character through their suffering is to get to know them, intimately. It can also be so intimate that it can physically hurt. The trick is in finding the right balance for the story at hand. Too much, and you risk readers shutting down, or becoming desensitized. Too little, and it can be jarring, out of place when it does crop up.

Horror films often insist that the scariest thing of all is having a body that does not behave in the way that it is “meant to.” Unfortunately, horror often positions disability as being caused by, or being the cause of, malicious wrongdoing, and this repeats itself in popular culture and feeds into the false idea that disability is inherently a bad thing. In the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is a visibly disabled character whose actions are framed as the result of his disfigurement, a need to torture others who do not experience the same self-loathing that he does. Audiences are told that Freddy Krueger is also evil because he’s disfigured; the Phantom of the Opera becomes a villain because he can’t possibly reveal his scars; and Jason Voorhees, with his disfigurement hidden behind a mask, demands your attention with murder.

If villainy is not the result of disability, then other eugenic beliefs about bodily form or biological inheritance become vital to the formation of classic horror’s visual and narrative conventions (Smith 2012). Audiences can see this pop-up in horror classics like any of the Frankenstein films, to Charles Laughton’s deformed Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) but you also see this in newer films, like with the inbreeding produced prophet in Midsommar (2019), or the Tethers in Us (2019) While a common interpretation of horror at large is that it perpetuates a lot of harm toward disabled people—the horror in horror films often being tied to a disability visual—I believe that body horror can offer enormous potential for understanding the disability experience. Below I pitch two possible avenues for turning to body horror to reimagine disability in popular culture. 

Body horror as an embodied experience 

Film spectators have individual bodies, individual medical histories, and a wide variety of fears, lived experiences, and cultural backgrounds. Every time a filmmaker makes a decision on how to depict a body (whether it fits the cultural standard or diverges from it), that decision touches on a hundred different associations and judgments. Body horror isn’t abstract. People live with it, every day, sometimes for only a brief period, sometimes for their entire life. There’s a huge difference between living with it, seeing it from afar, and fearing the threat of it.

Virtually all body horror films use body horror to highlight the vulnerability of the human body, often by showing grotesque unions of flesh and technology. To turn to a specific example, Cronenberg often employs an overarching theme to his films of cyborgian ways of living. He often includes explicit lines that reference the “new existence” or a new revolutionary way to live for the characters in his film. For example, Crimes of the Future (dir. David Cronenberg, 2022), the main plot centres around the idea that “surgery is the new sex,” noting that spectatorship and interpersonal relationships have fundamentally changed to suit the evolution of the human body. 

This common uniting of human and technology remains intriguing because it seems to allow for a masochistic paradigm to exist within film spectatorship that would allow for positive identification with, and representation of, disabled people. While disability representation in horror is often understood as ableist stigmatization, the same genre has the potential to form new intercorporeal relationships not only with disabled people but with our own bodies. This newfound relationship to subjecthood and bodily form allows nondisabled spectators to, in a sense, experience bodily differences similar to that of disability. Perhaps what is so threatening about the “dangerous” images in films (especially horror and other body genres) is the subversive potential represented by the unruly and grotesque carnival body (whether it belongs to the “insane” killer or the mutilated victim), reminding us all of the fleshy frailties of corporeal embodiment. 

Body horror as meta-horror 

While less obvious than the previous category, another way that body horror can help the re-imagining of disability is to situate disability within a meta-narrative. Body horror films often exist within a generic subset of horror that consciously operates to expose the inner workings of the genre in which they are situated. Meta horror (or just meta-cinema at large) constitutes films that are self-referential about their own genre. These films illustrate the potential of existing within but moving beyond their identifiable genre. This section is not to argue that body horror films are exempt from falling into the ableist and eugenic stereotypes about disability that the horror genre claims. In fact, it would probably be easier to overcome ableism in non-body horror films than within the body horror genre. Since disability is so tied to notions of bodily integrity, non-body horror films could separate audiences’ biases about disability and the body if they worked to represent disability in their narratives in any meaningful way. However, I believe that in order to make a real statement about disability within horror, filmmakers need to acknowledge the existence of stereotypes about disability (for a brief overview on disability stereotypes, check out Melinda Hall's article "Horrible Heroes: Liberating Alternative Visions of Disability in Horror” from Disability Studies Quarterly, 6, No. 1, 2016) in order to overcome them.  

Thus, body horror, as a genre of meta-horror, can serve to satirize ableism or reimagine corporeal embodiment. If disability is typically portrayed as something to be pitied, inspired by, or scared of, then body horror films can offer a visceral reimagining of the disabled figure both through the use of fantastical non-existent bodily abnormalities as well as worlds where these abnormalities are accepted, celebrated, and even desired. More than that, when body horror subverts expectations of what it means to exist in a body and when it distances the audience from what is taken as the natural order, it allows audiences to encounter disability differently. It can instead allow us to be horrified by ableism. 

One of the best examples of situating ableism as the real horror of disability is in The Fly (dir. David Cronenberg, 1986). The horror in The Fly is entirely predicated on expectations of health and ability. When Seth (Jeff Goldblum) transforms into his new existence, he is not scared of what his body does or is, he is not worried about acceptance, or survival; audiences are told that he is happy with his creation. The inability to communicate to Ronnie (Geena Davis) his comfort with his new life is what ultimately drives Seth to seek his human form again. His initial fascination with his perceived transformation into something superhuman curdles with dread and he loses his sense of identity, calling himself "Brundlefly" as if agreeing with Ronnie's assessment that he is indeed only half-human. He views himself through the lens that she has developed, learning to despise and shun the body that has so violently rebelled against society's expectations of normative success. There are no awards, no financial incentives in the extraordinary of his disabled body. Ronnie is emblematic of the whole of society for Seth, the source of all love and approval; he exclusively seeks out her acceptance, longing to piece together a body and life that she will no longer fear through any means necessary. Nothing less than abled, organic perfection will suffice. Body horror—and, to a greater extent, disability—can only exist if the abled, healthy, closed body is considered the standard for worthwhile living. Be afraid, be very afraid—of what?

Horror is the only genre in which disabled people are regularly represented at all, and as a result, cannot be ignored as a possible avenue for reimagining disability despite its often stereotypical and harmful representations. Body horror allows disability to remain a political identity while introducing revolutionary and inclusive ways of presenting disability that other genres haven’t yet attempted. Further explorations into the notion of disability representation as a process of satire or corporeal embodiment may well yield a model for viewing films outside of the often-stultifying political correctness of current disability representation. Of course, the negotiating of positive and negative representations is indeed an important project for any liberation movement, but there is also a need for a more inclusive, less hypercritical paradigm of cinematic viewing.  

Film is a producer of and a product of the ideology of the culture in which it exists. If the only representations of disability that we see fit into rigid stereotypes about what it means to be disabled, whether positive or negative, then the ideology surrounding disability will be tied to those representations. The way we understand disability in the real world will not move beyond those representations. Body horror offers a visceral reimagining of the disabled figure both through the use of fantastical non-existent bodily abnormalities as well as worlds where these abnormalities are accepted, celebrated, and even capitalized on. Even more than that, body horror offers audiences an opportunity to turn internally to their ableist behaviors and critique their own sets of beliefs. If we fail to accept vulnerability and incorporate it into our understanding of political communities, disability will always be the monster under the bed. Empathizing with "monsters" for whom exclusion is typical, draws the vulnerable forward and prepares us to challenge ableism politically.

References

• Smith, Angela. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia University Press, 2012.

• Hall, Melinda. “Horrible Heroes: Liberating Alternative Visions of Disability in Horror.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 6, No. 1, 2016.