The uneasy history of horror films and disability

Historically, horror films have been popular during times of social upheaval, as they allow audiences to work through collective cultural anxieties by tapping into their greatest fears. And “fear” is often built around ideas of what is “abnormal” – that is, different from socially constructed norms.

Throughout horror film history, disability has often been used as a visual shorthand marking the boundary between normal and abnormal.

Disability has long featured problematically as a metaphor for horror, evil or monstrosity. But a new wave of filmmakers are using horror to reflect on the lived experiences of people with disability.

Obsessive avengers

In horror, people with physical or intellectual disability often feature as villains driven by an obsessive desire for revenge on a world that caused their pain. We see this trope repeated in a number of slasher films from the 1970s and ‘80s, including Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

Disability film scholar Martin Norden describes this horror archetype as the obsessive avenger:

an egomaniacal sort, almost always a male, who does not rest until he has his revenge on those he holds responsible for his disablement and/or violating his moral code in some other way.

This connection between disability and villainy is no accident. In preparing for his role as Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, actor Gunnar Hansen observed students with intellectual disability at a specialist school, and adopted their mannerisms.

An evolving landscape

Disabled people are speaking out online about how their lives are impacted by harmful stereotypes of disability in the media. And this push for advocacy and awareness has led to shifts in cultural attitudes and film content policies.

In 2018, the British Film Institute announced it would no longer fund films that represent people with facial differences as evil or villainous. This decision was in direct response to the #IAmNotYourVillain campaign run by UK charity Changing Faces.

Under increasing scrutiny, filmmakers have also been called out for using disability as a symbol of horror, evil, or monstrosity.

Warner Bros was forced to apologize in 2020 after Anne Hathaway’s character in The Witches was criticised for stigmatising limb differences. Viewers noticed the resemblance between her “claws” in the film and a real-life genetic condition called ectrodactyly. This led to the #NotAWitch hashtag trending on social media.

Actor Lupita Nyong’o has apologised for using spasmodic dysphonia, a real larynx disorder, as inspiration for her evil doppelganger’s voice in Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us.

The National Spasmodic Dysphonia Association pointed out:

Spasmodic dysphonia is not a creepy voice; it’s not a scary voice. It’s a disability that people are living with and [they] shouldn’t be judged on.

Also in 2019, director Ari Aster was criticised for using the character of Ruben, a disabled child, for shock value in the horror hit Midsommar. As film critic Emma Madden argued in an article for The Guardian:

In keeping with Aster’s previous film Hereditary, in which physical and mental disability provides a metaphor for trauma and familial dysfunction, the disabled body once again becomes the monstrous body, used to convey a monstrous world.

From monster to hero

Many disabled people are huge fans of horror. The goal of critique is not to destroy monsters, or erase the horror genre, but to reduce its narrative dependence on ableism.

As horror fan Lotto Ramsay points out:

I want to feel horror. I don’t want to be the horror.

Today’s filmmakers are increasingly creating horror stories where the protagonist is disabled – perhaps in response to changing audience expectations and commentary. In doing so, they can interrogate the idea of “normal” in new ways. Some more recent horror films have even framed physical disability as an advantage, such as in Bird Box (2019) and A Quiet Place (2018).

In the slasher film Hush (2016), protagonist Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) is a deaf writer who uses American Sign Language to communicate. Stalked by a vicious killer she can’t hear, Maddie draws the audience into her desperate struggle for survival, encouraging them to identify with a disabled character in a horror context.

Of course, having a disabled protagonist does not guarantee the film will be free from ableism or negative stereotypes. The Advent Calendar (2021), a horror film with a wheelchair user at its centre, falls into old stereotypes by framing disability as something that needs “fixing”.

Just as we can look back on past horror as reflective of outdated attitudes towards race, gender and sexuality, so too does horror reflect the changing social construction of disability.

And this means future horror creators have a chance to tell stories which people with disability can enjoy – rather than feel targeted by.