The intersection of disability and horror has long been a fraught topic, with audiences anxious about disability portrayals, uncertain whether they should enjoy films that don’t accurately reflect the communities portrayed. Meanwhile, for many in the disability community, horror is one of the few spaces where any representation at all is likely to happen, and the horror community has been at the forefront in embracing those from the disability community into its ranks, as our panelists attest. In this roundtable, four film workers who specialise in horror content have a frank conversation about how their disabilities interact with their work and their love of horror and cult cinema. They each speak to the special relationship between identity and community, as well as the importance of representation.
Ariel Baska
Ariel Baska
From Ariel Baska’s Our First Priority
- Ariel Baska is a filmmaker, journalist, and academic author. Her first film, Our First Priority (2022), was an Official Selection of Final Girls Berlin and Frightfest UK, and won the Disability Advocacy Award from Superfest Disability Film Festival. Her first animated film, She’s Never Been a Bird Before (2021), was featured at the Engauge Experimental Film Festival. She has received multiple scholarships from Sundance Collab, was a speaker at SXSW 2022, and has produced a number of documentaries and horror shorts. Her podcast, Ride the Omnibus, is parked at the intersection of pop culture and social justice. More information at arielbaska.com.
- Cameron Mitchell is a filmmaker, film festival programmer/juror, and teacher. His films have premiered in over 20 countries worldwide with his most recent work, Elsa, about Deafblind author and fencer Elsa Sjunneson, premiering internationally on PBS. His first narrative film, The Co–Op (2021), was an Official Selection at Slamdance for its inaugural Unstoppable program which focuses on disability films and disabled filmmakers. His work has been featured on Netflix and in Rolling Stone and Variety. You can learn more about Cameron and his current projects at www.cameronsmitchell.com.
- Rabia Sitabi is a film programmer, marketing director, and pop culture expert with Asian and African roots. She has worked with many international film festivals, and is currently the Director of Marketing for Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam, where she is based. She regularly appears on Dutch television and radio programs as a pop culture expert, and has spoken at SXSW. In 2022, she was the Diversity Ambassador to Sundance for the Film Festival Alliance. She co-hosts two podcasts, the Cultured Curators and Ride the Omnibus. More information at rpish.com.
- Pea Woodruff is a writer, director and producer, with extensive experience in camera and electrical departments in various roles for both television and film. She is currently finishing post-production on her film Hunting Wolves, which she has written and directed.
Ariel: When you first got into horror, either through content or community, did you find that it helped you face specific aspects of your disability or the experience of being disabled? How did your relationship with horror begin?
Pea: I know for me, when my children were dealing with what was happening to me, the horror community took them in. And so it’s not just my problem. It’s not my disability. It’s our problem. It’s everyone’s disability, right? It’s societal. We’re lucky that film is a pocket of the world where we can talk about challenging subjects and we can challenge norms, particularly in horror. I don’t think you can have this conversation elsewhere. This conversation would never happen in the world of action film, or the rom-com. This is a really important conversation to me because I believe that being disabled isn’t a problem or issue for disabled people. I believe this is everyone’s problem. Because in the world we live, pregnancy is considered a disability. Old age is considered a disability. This is everybody’s conversation. Media is all about representation and inclusion. So I think this is where our people need to be having really important conversations.
From Cameron Mitchell’s The Co-Op
Cameron: Horror films are those types of films that you can get involved with just starting out because budgets tend to be thin. Financing is tough to find, even though it’s genre film. And so I kind of cut my teeth on my first feature film with Mario Sarita, making Deadly Gamble (2015). How that interacted, this relationship with disability, for me, is that there’s a lot of prosthesis in horror films. And so there were characters in these films that seemed disabled, but maybe were just there to be foils. And so, you know, I just spent a lot of time on set like meditating about what actual disabled people would look like in this film, and it actually inspired me to make The Co–Op, the first narrative short I did. I would just say the whole genre of horror is incredibly fascinating for what it doesn’t say, I would say it’s about like, Roger Waters or David Gilmour – it’s the negative spaces between. So yeah, it led to a lot of meditation for me about what a disability horror film would look like.
From Cameron Mitchell’s The Co-Op
Pea: Yeah, because you can’t send a message. Nobody wants to hear a message, but you can reach people you know, or people we love. That’s what stories are supposed to do, right? The campfire is supposed to reach you and move you and you can be effective or you can be right and that’s true in conversations or in storytelling. I can beat you over the head with my message, or I can put something out there that forces you to think and that’s what negative space does – it forces you to process. It’s not delivered into your head. And I think horror specifically, horror fans are unique. There’s no other genre that supports this depth and breadth of content. Or producers of content. Again, you won’t find that disability group talking about their low budget successes in the action world or in the romantic comedy world. This is unique to horror. And I think it is specifically because of what horror doesn’t say that it leaves a place for everyone. And I don’t think there’s another genre that comes close to that.
Rabia: I totally agree with that. But I think for me as well, looking at horror, I got into the community aspect of it because I started off going to festivals, and volunteering at Fantastic Film Nights… When I was younger, I was still at the precipice of discovering that I had been living with disabilities and that they were getting worse. The horror community was the community that was the most accommodating. Not per se on the screen. How much representation are you seeing? Not a lot, but in general, I was not seeing a lot of representation for me to start with because I’m a brown woman. So that’s a whole other layer. But the community itself has always been so warm. Of all the pop culture communities that I’m part of, also for my work, all the travels that I’ve done, the horror community has always been the most welcoming, the most open. You can end up in a city in a country where you do not speak the language and go to a horror festival or movie and people are just enthusiastic. They’re warm, they’re happy to introduce you into whatever they just saw, or you should really go see as well. And let’s go have a beer. So when my disability came out in that community more and more, it became more apparent that my disability was going to affect my being part of that community as a volunteer or being able to work at festivals or attend festivals.
I’ve seen a lot of people from within the community accommodate or reach out or be kind in a way that they were like, ‘Hey, okay, you can’t do this. Let’s find you a car. Hey, you know you can’t walk the stairs. Let’s find a way to get you up there.’ And again, that’s from the community side of things, not the film festival side of things, nor the filmmaker side of things. But gradually you’re seeing movement on the ‘professional’ side of these as well. Festivals are trying to be more mindful of representation and accessibility. As a programmer myself, I’ve really almost fought with fellow colleagues, saying ‘we really, really need this title. It might not resonate with you, because it’s not from your perspective and it might not even be for you. But there’s an audience out there, I can promise you, who it will be for and who it represents. And it’s a good movie, even though you don’t understand why it is.’ So sometimes as a programmer, you need to be able to step outside of your own bubble of, ‘I want this movie because I think it’s cool.’ And that’s what I had to learn over the years as well. Sometimes I programmed stuff that I didn’t like, but I think it’s important for programmers to get a lot of training in not only stepping outside of the genres that I like, but also stepping outside of the perspectives that I know. And that’s a slow movement at the moment. But the community itself, I’ve always loved, and like I said, it’s always been like a cuddle.
Ariel: What about representation on screen? You started to talk about that?
Rabia: We all need to start voting with our wallets. I think that’s the most important layer of this. We need fun projects like Ariel’s or Cameron’s. I want to see more representation from the disability perspective, either from people with that background or those who are able to look outside of their own perspective and then incorporate that in a different way. A way that’s not, ‘Oh, this person has a wheelchair, that’s their whole personality.’ There are too many horror movies that do that. Oh, this person has a scar, and that’s why they’re now the villain. Right?
Pea: That resonates a lot. I have a disfiguring degenerative disease, and its nickname is Quasimodo’s Curse. And I keep trying to explain to people, have you never read the book? Quasimodo is not the villain. It’s the way people treat Quasimodo and the way people see him, that’s more the villain than he is.
Ariel: What’s interesting to me also in hearing you talk about that, Pea, is this whole narrative around disfigurement on screen, and how that’s supposed to communicate something to us. I know for me personally, I had a very unusual experience as a kid, in that my first exposure to horror came from a bad babysitter who showed me A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). She brought over her boyfriend and some weed and put on A Nightmare on Elm Street and I saw Freddy Krueger on screen.
As a child who was born with a capillary hemangioma that left the right side of my face completely red, I saw Freddy Krueger and I was like, ‘Oh, I see someone that looks like me on screen.’ Yes, he’s a burn victim and a monstrous villain, but for the first time, I was able to actually connect with somebody that I saw on screen. And of course, it was Freddy. And for whatever set of reasons, I think it was at least partially because of my parents’ reaction of absolute horror when they heard what happened. They wanted to protect me and shield me from all the bad horrible, nasty things of horror and sci fi. They were completely opposed to my ever watching anything with vaguely horrific content, for whatever set of reasons.
But for me, early on, I decided that that was where I saw myself. Not that that’s a good thing. That was the only space where I felt like I had some kind of reflection of who I was. Because I always had this experience as a kid of being bullied by other people and not necessarily understanding why they perceived me differently. I finally had a cultural touchstone that explained why they were calling me pizza face, monster face, etc. As an only child, I didn’t have any knowledge of what that was, and so for me, that experience was both the moment I got into their heads and the moment that I felt I could see something of myself somewhere in the external world.
So what about the genre and the history of the genre speaks most to you as a disabled person? Is there a particular work that embodies your relationship to the genre?
Rabia: I think what’s interesting about looking at it through the lens of someone with a disability, I have an invisible disability, because if you meet me at first glance, you wouldn’t per se know that I live with disabilities. Obviously, the longer you hang with me you’re like, oh, okay, yeah, there’s stuff going on. I’m restricted in what I can do but what’s interesting with horror is that the restrictions have been lifted in horror. All the things that can happen in horror, the feeling that stuff can just go wrong in a certain way to people who are generally not disabled yet or – wait, what’s the best term to call someone who is currently not living with disabilities?
Pea: I call them ‘wellies’ in my world.
Cameron: The ‘normies’.
Rabia: The ‘normies’, yeah. I feel that if you have stuff going on in your life that is so fucked up or so tiring, and it’s taking so many spoons out of your life, horror can be this escape, right? And I think for me, at least, that I kind of trained my stress hormones, my cortisol levels, by just gulping down any type and as much horror as I could. And I think one of my therapists has even said that actually helped me survive. Being able to watch so much horror made me react better in real life when really stressful shit happened to me personally, because I was calmer, because I was like, okay, I can deal with this. This is not the end of the world. We can get through this – I can survive this.
And for some reason, I can relate that back to being someone who started at age six watching The Thing (1982). Like you, Ariel, I watched way too freaking young. For me, it was my mom and my aunt in the living room saying, ‘we’re watching a movie and you’re a child. So, if you want to sit in this room, this is the movie that we’re watching.’ Which, I mean, I’m six years old, and The Thing might not have been the best thing, but here we are. I’m still alive. We’re still going and partially that has to do with the fact that I wasn’t getting scared anymore. And the older I got, the more I got exposed to horror, and the more I got exposed to stressful situations that I learned to deal with and not be scared of. And that helped me cope better with my personal situation.
Ariel: They’ve actually done a lot of psychological studies that show that people have better responses to traumatic experiences in their lives if they’ve been prepared for them by horror movies. And I find that fascinating. So, if you want to prepare for an apocalypse, watch a lot of movies about the apocalypse.
Rabia: Pretty much, right? I even saw something recently that a group of psychologists want to band together and actually create a horror therapy module, like cognitive therapy but specifically focused on having people basically watch horror as homework and then help them through their therapy, using horror as a vehicle basically.
Cameron: You know, I definitely identify with watching horror as a coping mechanism. I met my wife in high school, and it’s something that we bonded over immediately. Early in our relationship, we were just watching lots of B-movie horror. In fact, I just remembered the After Dark Horror Fest, which existed briefly from 2006–2010, or something like that. And just watching all of those films and eating them up even though you know they’re not films you’ve heard of, really, unless you’re familiar with After Dark. But I find it interesting that a lot of films that I find to be the most influential on me are also ones that bend horror, or maybe try to break it in some way.
Like, Cronenberg is a big influence on me and his body horror. I feel like Cronenberg always gets it closer to right than anyone out there. But there’s so many things we can name here. And then [the] Scream [franchise] also was pretty genre-bending, particularly in their most recent installment, but of course this is also avoiding some of the problematic disability portrayals in films like that. Because they’re just there and we have had to accept them to this point, but at least it gets us some form of encounter, whereas we weren’t seeing any representation in other genres of film.
So yeah, I definitely resonate also with the Nightmare on Elm Street story you told. And The Thing too, I mean, who doesn’t like The Thing, you know? But also the disfigurement in that film is also a reflection of ourselves when we look into it in some way, but a horrifying reflection, right? We’re made to look at something that’s kind of been contorted and distorted in physically altering ways that’s supposed to horrify us. So yes, so many things to talk about. The net is so wide. I’m curious to see where this goes.
Pea: I would just like to say that we have not forgotten our friends who struggle with mental illness as a disability and how they are portrayed and preyed upon in all manner of film and media. So I just wanted to send that shout-out that those are disabled people also. And their portrayal in any type of film and media has great room for improvement, across the board.
Ariel: Oh, for sure. And you know, when we think about physical disfigurement and things that are visibly obvious in film there are also so many representations that are specifically about differences in people’s personalities or people who have anxiety or people who have intellectual disabilities, from I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to Friday the 13th (1980). We’ve got different kinds of examples of mental illness that are shown in various different kinds of ways and the question is always, is the villainy related to the disability? Well, that’s a whole other question, but first, I want to hear from you, Pea. Is there a particular work that embodies your relationship to the genre?
Pea: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). I identify with both heroes and villains in Buffy the Vampire Slayer because no one wants to be there. No one wants to be who they are. No one likes who they are. They all wish they were in another place in time. Buffy doesn’t want to be a slayer, Spike doesn’t want to be a vampire. He wants to be a person who could court the woman he loves, right? You know, everybody there is an embodiment of something they don’t want to be and yet they soldier on. They band together and they fight forward and it was not something I would have immediately identified with early in my disability. I had difficulty being diagnosed because my disorder is rare. And so I was hospitalised with it and when I was in bad shape, my youngest came to me and gave me a stick. In the hospital, that’s what he brought me. Everybody brings flowers. My little kid brought sticks. Because he saw on the television that Buffy’s mama was in the hospital and all the vampires were trying to kill her. And he saw a girl kill a vampire with a pencil and he was so sure this stick was so much better than a pencil. So all I had to do was kill the vampires and get my ass home because he needed me.
So, I mean, again, we think of this through our own lens. But just like I say to anyone in any room who has issues with the LGBTQIA+ community or other communities, you think this is not your problem. But this is your problem. Because your kids have a life and when one of their friends comes home and takes their life because they’re disabled or because they’ve been just completely isolated and ostracised from community – it does become your problem. Because now your child is dealing with this, because you did not prepare and inform them and educate them. So I think that Buffy was a great way for me to learn. I went from thinking it was all about me to ‘you know what, this isn’t just about me. I have a family. I have a community – there are other people with my disorder.’ And it rallied me to get my shit together and fight a little harder. THAT – that is our thing.
Ariel: It’s interesting how in all of our cases, looking at this question, it doesn’t necessarily need to be specifically disability representation for us to glom onto a particular film or piece. Sometimes just the message seems to be enough.
Cameron: Yeah. I just love Pea for bringing in Buffy because I think there’s a reason that so many people in the disability community have latched onto that at one point or another because of exactly what she described. It’s that these characters can be in these moulds that they don’t fit in, while they want to be somewhere else. That’s a very disability kind of concept. And actually, you know, I was kind of feeling the room out a bit before, what do we consider horror, right?
These are always tricky conversations of what films do we bring into the fold but it’s sometimes most fun to read disability onto things that maybe weren’t intended to be about disability, like Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and The Terminator (1984) were super influential. In particular, I just really identified with Arnold and his dismemberment, when he gets dropped into the pit and then has to come back and save her. I just identified with that part as a kid who always had back issues and different parts of my body weren’t functioning the way that they were supposed to be. And just imagining there’s someone like the Terminator out there, who can do it, even if he’s missing an arm and a leg. He comes back to save her and he’s constantly being reconstructed. And also he has the threat of being replaced with this other Terminator – that’s a read I have got to talk about. But yeah, that’s something I resonated with, if it’s horror.
Pea: That’s really important, because that’s the universal message that we have to tell. That what we’re experiencing doesn’t have to be a point of disability. It’s a point of struggle, and every individual at some point in their life will encounter the struggle. And I think there’s a great deal we can learn from the LGBTQIA+ community about representation. I mean, when’s the last time in a crowd you saw somebody in a wheelchair or on crutches or with one arm? It just doesn’t happen. So again, we’re in the big picture. Those messages are for us as well as a global audience. I don’t think we’re talking only to disabled people.
Rabia: I totally agree with that. But I think for me as well, looking at horror, I got into the community aspect of it because I started off going to festivals, and volunteering at Fantastic Film Nights… When I was younger, I was still at the precipice of discovering that I had been living with disabilities and that they were getting worse. The horror community was the community that was the most accommodating. Not per se on the screen. How much representation are you seeing? Not a lot, but in general, I was not seeing a lot of representation for me to start with because I’m a brown woman. So that’s a whole other layer. But the community itself has always been so warm. Of all the pop culture communities that I’m part of, also for my work, all the travels that I’ve done, the horror community has always been the most welcoming, the most open. You can end up in a city in a country where you do not speak the language and go to a horror festival or movie and people are just enthusiastic. They’re warm, they’re happy to introduce you into whatever they just saw, or you should really go see as well. And let’s go have a beer. So when my disability came out in that community more and more, it became more apparent that my disability was going to affect my being part of that community as a volunteer or being able to work at festivals or attend festivals.
I’ve seen a lot of people from within the community accommodate or reach out or be kind in a way that they were like, ‘Hey, okay, you can’t do this. Let’s find you a car. Hey, you know you can’t walk the stairs. Let’s find a way to get you up there.’ And again, that’s from the community side of things, not the film festival side of things, nor the filmmaker side of things. But gradually you’re seeing movement on the ‘professional’ side of these as well. Festivals are trying to be more mindful of representation and accessibility. As a programmer myself, I’ve really almost fought with fellow colleagues, saying ‘we really, really need this title. It might not resonate with you, because it’s not from your perspective and it might not even be for you. But there’s an audience out there, I can promise you, who it will be for and who it represents. And it’s a good movie, even though you don’t understand why it is.’ So sometimes as a programmer, you need to be able to step outside of your own bubble of, ‘I want this movie because I think it’s cool.’ And that’s what I had to learn over the years as well. Sometimes I programmed stuff that I didn’t like, but I think it’s important for programmers to get a lot of training in not only stepping outside of the genres that I like, but also stepping outside of the perspectives that I know. And that’s a slow movement at the moment. But the community itself, I’ve always loved, and like I said, it’s always been like a cuddle.
Ariel: What about representation on screen? You started to talk about that?
Rabia: We all need to start voting with our wallets. I think that’s the most important layer of this. We need fun projects like Ariel’s or Cameron’s. I want to see more representation from the disability perspective, either from people with that background or those who are able to look outside of their own perspective and then incorporate that in a different way. A way that’s not, ‘Oh, this person has a wheelchair, that’s their whole personality.’ There are too many horror movies that do that. Oh, this person has a scar, and that’s why they’re now the villain. Right?
Pea: That resonates a lot. I have a disfiguring degenerative disease, and its nickname is Quasimodo’s Curse. And I keep trying to explain to people, have you never read the book? Quasimodo is not the villain. It’s the way people treat Quasimodo and the way people see him, that’s more the villain than he is.
Ariel: What’s interesting to me also in hearing you talk about that, Pea, is this whole narrative around disfigurement on screen, and how that’s supposed to communicate something to us. I know for me personally, I had a very unusual experience as a kid, in that my first exposure to horror came from a bad babysitter who showed me A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). She brought over her boyfriend and some weed and put on A Nightmare on Elm Street and I saw Freddy Krueger on screen.
As a child who was born with a capillary hemangioma that left the right side of my face completely red, I saw Freddy Krueger and I was like, ‘Oh, I see someone that looks like me on screen.’ Yes, he’s a burn victim and a monstrous villain, but for the first time, I was able to actually connect with somebody that I saw on screen. And of course, it was Freddy. And for whatever set of reasons, I think it was at least partially because of my parents’ reaction of absolute horror when they heard what happened. They wanted to protect me and shield me from all the bad horrible, nasty things of horror and sci fi. They were completely opposed to my ever watching anything with vaguely horrific content, for whatever set of reasons.
But for me, early on, I decided that that was where I saw myself. Not that that’s a good thing. That was the only space where I felt like I had some kind of reflection of who I was. Because I always had this experience as a kid of being bullied by other people and not necessarily understanding why they perceived me differently. I finally had a cultural touchstone that explained why they were calling me pizza face, monster face, etc. As an only child, I didn’t have any knowledge of what that was, and so for me, that experience was both the moment I got into their heads and the moment that I felt I could see something of myself somewhere in the external world.
So what about the genre and the history of the genre speaks most to you as a disabled person? Is there a particular work that embodies your relationship to the genre?
Rabia: I think what’s interesting about looking at it through the lens of someone with a disability, I have an invisible disability, because if you meet me at first glance, you wouldn’t per se know that I live with disabilities. Obviously, the longer you hang with me you’re like, oh, okay, yeah, there’s stuff going on. I’m restricted in what I can do but what’s interesting with horror is that the restrictions have been lifted in horror. All the things that can happen in horror, the feeling that stuff can just go wrong in a certain way to people who are generally not disabled yet or – wait, what’s the best term to call someone who is currently not living with disabilities?
Pea: I call them ‘wellies’ in my world.
Cameron: The ‘normies’.
Rabia: The ‘normies’, yeah. I feel that if you have stuff going on in your life that is so fucked up or so tiring, and it’s taking so many spoons out of your life, horror can be this escape, right? And I think for me, at least, that I kind of trained my stress hormones, my cortisol levels, by just gulping down any type and as much horror as I could. And I think one of my therapists has even said that actually helped me survive. Being able to watch so much horror made me react better in real life when really stressful shit happened to me personally, because I was calmer, because I was like, okay, I can deal with this. This is not the end of the world. We can get through this – I can survive this.
And for some reason, I can relate that back to being someone who started at age six watching The Thing (1982). Like you, Ariel, I watched way too freaking young. For me, it was my mom and my aunt in the living room saying, ‘we’re watching a movie and you’re a child. So, if you want to sit in this room, this is the movie that we’re watching.’ Which, I mean, I’m six years old, and The Thing might not have been the best thing, but here we are. I’m still alive. We’re still going and partially that has to do with the fact that I wasn’t getting scared anymore. And the older I got, the more I got exposed to horror, and the more I got exposed to stressful situations that I learned to deal with and not be scared of. And that helped me cope better with my personal situation.
Ariel: They’ve actually done a lot of psychological studies that show that people have better responses to traumatic experiences in their lives if they’ve been prepared for them by horror movies. And I find that fascinating. So, if you want to prepare for an apocalypse, watch a lot of movies about the apocalypse.
Rabia: Pretty much, right? I even saw something recently that a group of psychologists want to band together and actually create a horror therapy module, like cognitive therapy but specifically focused on having people basically watch horror as homework and then help them through their therapy, using horror as a vehicle basically.
Cameron: You know, I definitely identify with watching horror as a coping mechanism. I met my wife in high school, and it’s something that we bonded over immediately. Early in our relationship, we were just watching lots of B-movie horror. In fact, I just remembered the After Dark Horror Fest, which existed briefly from 2006–2010, or something like that. And just watching all of those films and eating them up even though you know they’re not films you’ve heard of, really, unless you’re familiar with After Dark. But I find it interesting that a lot of films that I find to be the most influential on me are also ones that bend horror, or maybe try to break it in some way.
Like, Cronenberg is a big influence on me and his body horror. I feel like Cronenberg always gets it closer to right than anyone out there. But there’s so many things we can name here. And then [the] Scream [franchise] also was pretty genre-bending, particularly in their most recent installment, but of course this is also avoiding some of the problematic disability portrayals in films like that. Because they’re just there and we have had to accept them to this point, but at least it gets us some form of encounter, whereas we weren’t seeing any representation in other genres of film.
So yeah, I definitely resonate also with the Nightmare on Elm Street story you told. And The Thing too, I mean, who doesn’t like The Thing, you know? But also the disfigurement in that film is also a reflection of ourselves when we look into it in some way, but a horrifying reflection, right? We’re made to look at something that’s kind of been contorted and distorted in physically altering ways that’s supposed to horrify us. So yes, so many things to talk about. The net is so wide. I’m curious to see where this goes.
Pea: I would just like to say that we have not forgotten our friends who struggle with mental illness as a disability and how they are portrayed and preyed upon in all manner of film and media. So I just wanted to send that shout-out that those are disabled people also. And their portrayal in any type of film and media has great room for improvement, across the board.
Ariel: Oh, for sure. And you know, when we think about physical disfigurement and things that are visibly obvious in film there are also so many representations that are specifically about differences in people’s personalities or people who have anxiety or people who have intellectual disabilities, from I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to Friday the 13th (1980). We’ve got different kinds of examples of mental illness that are shown in various different kinds of ways and the question is always, is the villainy related to the disability? Well, that’s a whole other question, but first, I want to hear from you, Pea. Is there a particular work that embodies your relationship to the genre?
Pea: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). I identify with both heroes and villains in Buffy the Vampire Slayer because no one wants to be there. No one wants to be who they are. No one likes who they are. They all wish they were in another place in time. Buffy doesn’t want to be a slayer, Spike doesn’t want to be a vampire. He wants to be a person who could court the woman he loves, right? You know, everybody there is an embodiment of something they don’t want to be and yet they soldier on. They band together and they fight forward and it was not something I would have immediately identified with early in my disability. I had difficulty being diagnosed because my disorder is rare. And so I was hospitalised with it and when I was in bad shape, my youngest came to me and gave me a stick. In the hospital, that’s what he brought me. Everybody brings flowers. My little kid brought sticks. Because he saw on the television that Buffy’s mama was in the hospital and all the vampires were trying to kill her. And he saw a girl kill a vampire with a pencil and he was so sure this stick was so much better than a pencil. So all I had to do was kill the vampires and get my ass home because he needed me.
So, I mean, again, we think of this through our own lens. But just like I say to anyone in any room who has issues with the LGBTQIA+ community or other communities, you think this is not your problem. But this is your problem. Because your kids have a life and when one of their friends comes home and takes their life because they’re disabled or because they’ve been just completely isolated and ostracised from community – it does become your problem. Because now your child is dealing with this, because you did not prepare and inform them and educate them. So I think that Buffy was a great way for me to learn. I went from thinking it was all about me to ‘you know what, this isn’t just about me. I have a family. I have a community – there are other people with my disorder.’ And it rallied me to get my shit together and fight a little harder. THAT – that is our thing.
Ariel: It’s interesting how in all of our cases, looking at this question, it doesn’t necessarily need to be specifically disability representation for us to glom onto a particular film or piece. Sometimes just the message seems to be enough.
Cameron: Yeah. I just love Pea for bringing in Buffy because I think there’s a reason that so many people in the disability community have latched onto that at one point or another because of exactly what she described. It’s that these characters can be in these moulds that they don’t fit in, while they want to be somewhere else. That’s a very disability kind of concept. And actually, you know, I was kind of feeling the room out a bit before, what do we consider horror, right?
These are always tricky conversations of what films do we bring into the fold but it’s sometimes most fun to read disability onto things that maybe weren’t intended to be about disability, like Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and The Terminator (1984) were super influential. In particular, I just really identified with Arnold and his dismemberment, when he gets dropped into the pit and then has to come back and save her. I just identified with that part as a kid who always had back issues and different parts of my body weren’t functioning the way that they were supposed to be. And just imagining there’s someone like the Terminator out there, who can do it, even if he’s missing an arm and a leg. He comes back to save her and he’s constantly being reconstructed. And also he has the threat of being replaced with this other Terminator – that’s a read I have got to talk about. But yeah, that’s something I resonated with, if it’s horror.
Pea: That’s really important, because that’s the universal message that we have to tell. That what we’re experiencing doesn’t have to be a point of disability. It’s a point of struggle, and every individual at some point in their life will encounter the struggle. And I think there’s a great deal we can learn from the LGBTQIA+ community about representation. I mean, when’s the last time in a crowd you saw somebody in a wheelchair or on crutches or with one arm? It just doesn’t happen. So again, we’re in the big picture. Those messages are for us as well as a global audience. I don’t think we’re talking only to disabled people.