We Need a Different Point of View on Disability in Horror Movies
“Kalos kai agathos” was an ancient Greek ideal that connected beauty with goodness and virtue. The shadow of that idea is familiar: if beauty is treated as proof of goodness, ugliness can easily get cast as moral corruption.
I love cinema, and I’m a fan of horror. But as a writer and a woman with a disability, I keep noticing something: too often, the bad guys, the monsters and the “freaks” are people coded as physically or mentally disabled. Films such as Freaks and Split show different ways horror has made disability, mental illness and bodily difference part of its visual language of fear.
As a woman with a disability, I know my worth and my beauty don’t depend on matching somebody else’s idea of “normal.” I’ve experienced the opposite of the horror stereotype: in a crowd, walking down the street or riding a bus, I’m not the source of danger. I’ve been on the receiving end of other people’s cruelty.
That’s part of why I’m drawn to films that change the point of view. Two that stand out are A Quiet Place, directed by John Krasinski, and The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat.
When disability isn’t the monster
In A Quiet Place, one of the main characters is a Deaf young girl. Her story arc is brilliant. In a world dominated by monsters that hunt by sound, her deafness is part of how she understands and survives that world. The film gives her agency instead of using disability as a shortcut for fear.
Coralie Fargeat, who also wrote The Substance, takes a different route. The film shows a beautiful woman coming face to face with a monstrous version of the body she has been taught to fear. For me, that creature grows out of insecurity and self-loathing, but also from society’s oppressive and absurd demands on women’s bodies and, ultimately, women themselves.
I want to see more daring films like A Quiet Place and The Substance. Disabled people, women and anyone treated as “too different” already know what it’s like to move through a world that can be hostile. Horror doesn’t need to keep treating difference itself as the threat.
Change the point of view. Let disability be part of the human story without making it the monster.
Related reading
Disability stereotypes in movies and stage continue in outdated cliched ways
