What Horror Can Bring to Disability Representation

Horror is, to put it gently, not known for being an inclusive genre. After building up a reputation for tropes like “Black guy dies first” and “ancient Native American burial grounds”, killing any woman who dares have sex (or be sexy, or just exist), and creating entire subgenres around asylums, maybe I shouldn’t have been too surprised when the first response I got to a lament about the lack of good disability representation in horror was a friend’s tepid, “Well, it’s horror. What do you expect?”

I opened my mouth to protest. I closed my mouth to think. “There’s ‘For Lack of a Bed’,” I offered after a moment. John Wiswell’s story treads the line between horror and dark fantasy, but anything nominated for a Nebula ought to count on my side. “Andy Tytler has ‘The Comments Section’. I guess that’s sci-fi, though.” While more about ableist systems, and focusing on a transmissible disease, I would gladly take characters like Polka_Dots_And_Pansies_Make_Me_Sick. Systemic horror should be a genre, I decided.My friend waited.

I shrugged. This was where, in writing, I would have put an ‘etc.’ “There’s probably more.”

The conversation changed, but I kept thinking about my two-point list. I write horror, and I write disabled characters, even if I wasn’t going to count my own work here. I can easily read a book a week and countless short stories, as well as listening to podcasts. Most of my media intake is horror. I seek out disabled characters. Even knowing my list was hardly exhaustive, how could I only come up with two titles? 

I scoured my shelves. I went through my library checkout history. I picked through the tables of contents of anthologies I’d read, as well as the episode lists of podcasts. Some of these were disability-focused, and many of those were speculative fiction. Surely they wouldn’t leave out horror?

Five stories. One podcast episode, four short stories. Even adding in the ones I wouldn’t normally classify as horror, I could only get up to seven. No novels. Nothing longform at all. Two podcast episodes, five short stories.

What did I expect? I guess I expected better.

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The friend who had seemed so ambivalent is a fellow disabled author, and one who occasionally writes horror. Many of my writing friends are staunch supporters of disability representation, and will recommend me a book if it is so much as implies that a major character has a limp. I look forward to books like Ghost Orchid Press’s upcoming Rewired anthology, focusing on neurodiverse horror, but these seem to be an exception to the rule. Eventually I started to ask: why not horror?

Between asking people and reading others’ opinions online, I found a grim answer in what is otherwise an enthusiastic movement for disability representation. Horror was dark. Disability in horror meant that the killer was “deranged” and didn’t know what they were doing. Disabled people “don’t really read horror”, and non-disabled people wouldn’t understand. If they hurt a disabled character for the sake of the narrative, wouldn’t that just be falling into the very tropes they decried? Was it even possible to write a positive depiction of disability in a genre that is inherently somewhat negative?

After years of stories of haunted insane asylums, murderers with “a secret split personality”, and villains being described as “misshapen” and “malformed”, it shouldn’t be surprising that most disabled people are not keen to indulge the genre. More than that, horror relies at least in part on misery. The disability community tends toward a message of strength—We are real. We are important, and we are beautiful. Science fiction and fantasy show us at the best we could possibly be, and I love these genres and stories for that.

There is a downside to this relentlessly sunny message, however. Much in the same way that the queer community must contend with perceptions regarding purity and deviance, the disability community confronts the push and pull of getting our needs met and avoiding pity. We fear that the world around us will consider us a burden for admitting it when we suffer. When we struggle, are we saying that those who want us dead are right? Are our lives truly not worth living? Fatigue, pain, humiliation, must all be handled with absolute grace so as not to imply otherwise. To acknowledge them is to follow it with how we are still worthy, and how we will still rise above. 

The conversations about harmful tropes and depictions are necessary, but I fear that we are too willing to cut out important stories for the sake of appearing superficially unproblematic. As such, I’d like to suggest what horror can gain from disabled characters, and what disability representation can gain from horror. 

Disability in Horror
Most of this article is trying to sell horror to disabled authors, but horror stories with disabled characters won’t get far if editors and readers aren’t on board. What can disabled characters give to horror that horror doesn’t already have?

First, a diversity of perspectives. Many horror protagonists are, for lack of a better phrase, intentionally bland (read: cis, white, heterosexual, you know the drill) so the reader can put themselves in their place. The reader is supposed to relate to the character, perceive things the same way as the character, and react the same as the character. The events of the story are supposed to evoke the emotions of them happening to the reader.

The problem with this idea of the everyman is that very, very few people are completely like the everyman. Moreover, this lack of characterization makes it difficult to even tell stories apart. I have read hundreds of stories with the same mild-mannered-until-it-gets-rough white guy protagonist, and if you gave them all the same name and said they were part of a multiverse of the same man, I would believe you. 

Show readers new ways to see reality. Not just to support marginalized authors (though do that as well), but because it’s so much more engaging than reading the same thing over and over again.

Second, disabled people often already deal with the very things horror addresses. Isolation? Plenty of people can’t leave their houses, and you find quickly during ill health whether your friends are willing to visit. Confusion, disconnect, and being overwhelmed? Especially for neurodivergent people, this is a daily. Existential dread? When there’s an entire political movement of “maybe just die to make things better for the rest of us”, there’s dread to spare. Understanding how these emotions operate in real life adds nuance to narratives, and will resonate with audiences (disabled or not) even if the isolation is from falling into a netherworld, not a lengthy hospital stay, or the overwhelm is from a cosmic horror, not sensory processing problems.

Lastly, disability has a way of accentuating and highlighting experiences. You learn a lot about the people around you when they suggest euthanasia over medical treatment. People who are otherwise considered “maybe a bit rude” often are the ones who will turn down every request for the most reasonable accommodations. The world has sharper edges. At the same time, good days are even better, because you don’t know when or if you’ll have them again. I wouldn’t want disability to just be used as a metaphor or framing device, but having a disability does show you different parts of the world.

Horror and Honesty
I’ll let you in on a secret. The first draft of this section had roughly 300 more words in which I attempted to gently suggest that disability representation tends towards palatability for non-disabled readers, without saying those exact words. I was euphemizing an entire section on euphemism. So, here’s the thing: disability representation relies heavily on euphemism of more “gross” or alarming symptoms for fear of alienating non-disabled (or otherwise disabled) readers.

I have never read a character who was incontinent, had open sores, or used a feeding tube. Blisters, nausea, and vertigo are ignored or mentioned only in passing. And I understand why! I’ve caught myself carefully editing out passages I thought might be “too much”. I still do it sometimes, because I’m afraid an editor wouldn’t pick up a story in which I mention a character putting on a pull-up instead of underwear. We fear that these things will upset readers, but in removing them, we risk bowdlerizing our own experiences. The culture of shame around normal parts of people’s daily lives continues when we hide them away. If we want that to stop, something’s got to give.

This is where we can find an odd solace in horror. Even coming from a primarily quiet/psychological horror space, most readers aren’t going to be too squeamish. Mentions of pain and bodily fluids are not out of place even when the horror hasn’t started. I don’t suggest making these things a major focus, but I feel I have more room to describe a character changing the dressing on a sore in horror than I do in fantasy. Just having a character with a feeding tube (even if they must fend off a rabid hyena-beast halfway through cleaning their port) would go a long way toward normalizing these devices.

These aren’t comfortable topics, and it’s reasonable to worry that they could be used for shock value, or unintentionally link these things with fear and horror. However, with proper framing as a normal (maybe annoying, or onerous, but normal) part of a complex character’s routine, I believe it would be a good first step to accepting the things we often leave for last in talks of disability. With any hope, other genres would follow suit.

Horror and Heroics
One of the most common arguments against having disabled characters be visibly in pain, or weak, or otherwise unable to do things, is that it puts disabled people in general in a bad light. The concept of “good disability representation” is herded toward “disabled badasses” like Marvel’s Daredevil, DC’s Cyborg, and Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Toph. Why shouldn’t disabled people get to see themselves as the heroes?

This is where we usually run up against the issue of disabled characters not being allowed to struggle with their disability, however, at least not in a substantive way. Characters in these genres are expected to infinitely overcome, and so they do.

Horror offers an alternative to this. Horror protagonists, disabled or not, often are dealing with something in their life outside of the horror at hand. They’re going through divorces and breakups, or are trying to make ends meet, or have strained relationships with family. In the end, though, they work on their problems, they survive, and even if they do not become stronger, they are changed by their experiences. A disabled protagonist might not be primarily worried about their disability, but having the protagonist grapple with a spate of bad pain days is not out of the question. And ultimately, I am less interested in having a character who looks like me than I am in a character who lives in this world like I do.

Despite being a genre that hinges on things going horribly wrong, horror also has plenty of room for people making it right. Someone has to slay the monster, close the portal to Hell, and exorcise the demons. There’s no reason that the character who does this can’t be disabled. It’s the best of both worlds—we can talk earnestly about the things we really, truly cannot do, we can admit that we are exhausted and in pain, but we can still save the day. 

By Cormack Baldwin

Twitter: @cormackbaldwin, @archiveoftheodd