Unlike a lot of horror fans, my love for the genre does not come from movies, but rather from books. From the bloody animal transmogrification of Mona Awad’s Bunny to the bony, fleshy body horror of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb novels, horror-informed works pop up everywhere in my reading lists.
With most of these books published in the last ten years, it’s easy for me to see myself in them. In the Locked Tomb, for example, many characters are queer women with sick bodies, something I can relate to completely.
My very first foray into horror movies was almost ten years ago. In 2016, I was in Year 8, and I was at my best friend’s house for a sleepover. We had decided we were properly grown up, and as such, we were going to watch a horror movie — and be scared to death.
The movie we watched was Hush (2016). In hush, a d/Deaf woman alone in a cabin in the woods must save herself from a killer, without being able to hear him or herself. The movie spins many traditional horror situations through the lens of deafness as its primary method of creating fear. Are you breathing too loudly in your hiding place and you don’t know it? Can you not hear the killer’s footsteps behind you? Arguably, the movie ends in an empowering way, with the protagonist saving herself from the killer. At the very least, she is not aggressively butchered or demonised, a rarity for disabled characters (or in the case of Hush, a character perceived as disabled, given many d/Deaf people do not consider themselves disabled due to their specific culture).
Despite my relatively positive experiences with the genre, horror is historically not the greatest place for disabled people like myself. Many horror villains and monsters are portrayed as disabled in some way; from mental disabilities to facial differences to a “mysterious sickness”, disability is used as a shorthand for “scary”, for “wrong”, for perhaps lazy writers to make their characters “monstrous” without having to find them more complex motivations.
However, though we weren’t seeing flattering portrayals, they were portrayals, in a world where disabled people are often excluded from both media and public life — it is, in many ways, a Catch 22. Would you rather be a monstrous horror you can maybe reimagine into something you resonate with, or not be seen at all?
Furthermore, the disabled horror in some ways is a potent counter-narrative to equally frustrating “positive” narratives surrounding disability. These are the narratives where disabled people are infantalised, for the inspiration of abled people, or desperately waiting for a cure, a change, an opportunity to ‘overcome’ their disability.
I find myself tired of these saccharine portrayals of disabled bodies, and find myself wondering: maybe the horror movies I’ve read so many articles about, but not yet watched, can provide a different way to see stories about my community, even if we are going to be seen as monstrous. Maybe there is some comfort to be found in the monstrousness.
With this in mind, I decided to watch Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973).
I’ve read a lot of articles about this movie, many of them in reference to the way it resonates with disabled people. Though the film depicts a young girl possessed by demons, it’s fundamentally about a young girl with a sick body, surrounded by doctors who cannot help her.
From the ages of 14-20, I was a young girl navigating the world with a sick body, with doctors who didn’t know how to help her.
I watch the movie on my tiny phone screen, in broad daylight. While I love the themes of horror, I don’t exactly love to be scared. It’s funny, though, the movie didn’t really scare me like I thought it would. At times, it felt like looking in a mirror.
As I watched the film’s protagonist Reagan grin and bear it as she was poked with needles, it felt hard to believe that she was going to be a monster. I remember being poked with needles. Blood test after blood test. Cannulas in freezing hospital rooms. The injections I have once a month to enable me to get out of bed.
Though she was meant to be possessed by a demon, Regan’s sickness in The Exorcist felt like one of the more honest and relatable portrayals I’ve seen of what it is like to be sick.
Sometimes being sick does feel like demonic possession. Sometimes you want to scream, and swear, and yell, and act out when doctors just don’t know what’s wrong, when help seems to not exist.
In watching Reagan, I found more empathy for myself.
Maybe it is wrong that horror movies show sickness as demonic, and evil, and wrong.
But maybe, just maybe, it’s okay that I watch it and feel seen.
