Disability, whether in
its visible (physical) or invisible (mental illness) forms, have always had
minimal representation in popular culture; save one genre: Horror. This
specific genre accounts for an overabundance of disability imagery, especially
among the antagonists of the stories. Whether they be dream demons, disgruntled
campers, orchestral menaces, or a wide variety of malevolent spirits, curses,
or other beasties; disability is often used as a shorthand in storytelling to
convey villainy. It is through the
popularity and profitability of these stereotypical images of disability, (because
horror films are often cheap to make and have a strong return on investment), which
allow them to be continually disseminated throughout our American Culture.
Using the Sociological and Disability Perspectives, this paper will examine the
intersecting points of disability and capitalism among horror antagonists; to
understand the value of disability stereotypes in horror (and its possible
subversion) while concurrently maintaining the image of middle-class whiteness
as normal through its genre’s protagonists.
HISTORICL CONTEXT
Bourdieu’s forms of
Capital[1]
The basic Marxian
critique of Capitalism is its tendency to operate from the profit motive. The
idea that within the capitalist market, profit is the most important factor.
The drive for capitalism to be deregulated is because of this desire for
profit. Usually, this profit is satisfied through economic capital (Money).
Yet, as Bourdieu (1987) points out, there are additional forms of value, that too,
can be “profitable” within the system of capitalism. These forms of capital
“function as a social relation of power that become objects of struggle as
valued resources (Swartz 1997: 73-74).
Cultural Capital
is the value of knowledge skills and experiences within a particular social
situation. This type of capital can be acquired individually (through personal
experiences and independent reading/research) or collectively as a part of a
larger structural mechanism of order and socialization (Schools). This is the
value we place on “what people know.”
Social Capital
is the value of your social relationships with in a particular social situation.
A lot of the social capital that people build and develop, are determined by
the power dynamics and how those dynamics shift with every situation. As
Foucault (1999) notes, power resides in relationships, which makes power fluid
between individuals within different social situations.
Symbolic Capital
is the value of one’s identity and perceived demographics; as they create
avenues or barriers to resources, privileges, and opportunities based upon the
perceived value assigned through cultural and social norms. It is the development,
manipulation, and organization of various social systems, which create various
forms of privileges for some groups, while simultaneously creating stratification
and discrimination for others.
Symbolic Violence
is the process by which these unequal understandings are internalized by marginalized
populations; to define themselves and others in their assigned group. Thus,
they define themselves by the standards those that can define and influence
public perception set for them.
Erotic/Sexual
Capital[2]: is
the value of an individual based on their ability to subscribe and achieve
Socio-historic and cultural beauty/body norms in the eyes of others. According
to Green (2008), this is the process by which an individual or group acquires
and accumulates behaviors and characteristics that generate sexual desire in others.
Some of this may be achieved through genetic predispositions and hereditary, while
others can be achieved through diet, exercise, beauty products and surgeries, based
upon socio-cultural beauty norms established within a particular society (Green
2008). Green (2008) also states that even though the cultural messages
surrounding beauty are often consistent, not only can these messages change
based upon the differences in social and historical context, a lot of what
generates desire is subjective. Therefore, some have argued that Erotic Capital
is more so a function of the field (a social space where capital is obtained
through the performance of a particular habitus) rather than a different form
of capital. However, this, and the other forms of capital, become an important
factor in looking at the relationship between disability and capitalism among
Horror antagonists. Much of this relationship can be attributed to a variety of
disability stereotypes, created in the silent movie era by renowned character
actor Lon Cheney, and his ilk.
Disability Stereotypes in
Horror
According to Norden
(1993), most films have alienated disabled characters from able bodied peers through
“Otherness”; a process that reduces the disabled (and additional marginalized
groups) to objectifications of pity, fear, and scorn (1). This leads to inaccurate
disability representations on screen so abysmal, that even when Disabled people
are featured, the disabled do not see themselves reflected in these depictions.
This began early in film history through the silent era, where a variety of
disability stereotypes got their start, brought to prominence by the work of
Lon Cheney and his contemporaries in the early 20th century. These roles
became instrumental to the horror genre, and the depictions of disability there
in (Norden 1993).
Beginning his career in
1913, character actor Lon Cheney became known as “The man with a thousand faces”,
for his ability to morph into different characters with a variety of physicalities;
by using make up, costumes and prosthetics.
The years long partnership between Cheney and director Charles Browning,
a man who admittedly was both fascinated and repelled by physically disabled
people, shaped the public perception of disability on film. It was through these early films that disability
became intertwined with the Horror Genre. The solidification of which came with
1923’s Hunchback of Notre Dame in which Cheney played Quasimoto (Norden
1993).
During the production of Hunchback,
Cheney put “himself in extreme discomfort for three months. He wore forty
pounds of molded rubber on his chest and back held in place by a thirty-pound
harness… [and a costume] of animal hair” (Norden 1993:90). Praise for this “transformation” and the
physical toll it took on Cheney’s body, is one of the first instances of a
non-disabled person achieving notoriety for playing a disabled character.
Something that would eventually become an industry standard (more on that later). Cheney’s performance was so compelling, that even
though average ticket prices at the time were around 50 cents, people were
willing to pay in upwards of $1.65 in order to see “Cheney contort his way
through the title role” (Norden 1993:90).
Throughout his career,
Cheney would play hundreds of disabled characters, and helped to manufacture one
of the prominent disability stereotypes in film, The Obsessive Avenger”. The
Obsessive Avenger is typically “an adult male who will not rest until he has
had his revenge on those he holds responsible for his disablement; and/or
violating his moral code in some way (Norden 1993: 52). While this was first
popularized by Cheney in Hunchback, the stereotype has enjoyed a consistent
reproduction in several film genres. In horror, this stereotype often surfaces in
the “Slasher” sub-genre. Many of the horror antagonist, especially those
depicted in the late 70’s early 80’s horror films, are getting revenge on those
he believes wronged him in some way, whether those “avengers” are wearing a
hockey mask, or scary gloved garden sheers. Yet, the longevity of this horror staple
is due to Lon Cheney. An actor whose work in retrospect might be more aptly
described as “man of a thousand disabilities” (Norden 1993:74).
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
Why Horror Matters to the
Perception of the Disabled Identity
According to Kristeva (1982),
we assimilate and are socialized to ideas of defilement and repugnance within
our society, that once internalized, becomes biologically deterministic through
the actions of stomach spasms, vomiting, perspiration, increased heartbeat and crying. It is the horror genre, which peddles in this
defilement and debauchery, eliciting feelings of fear and repugnance in the
audience. By using the various images of the disabled to achieve this, results
in the disabled being representative of that desecration. The disabled become
the embodiment of abstraction within the genre; the immoral sinister scheming
and shady…a terror that disassembles (Kristeva 1982:4). Thus, when people
experience and interact with the disabled after internalizing these messages
from the horror genre, they ultimately experience culture shock along with the
same biologically deterministic manifestations of their revulsion.
This revulsion is
illustrated in the moments nondisabled people meet physically disabled people
on the street. They often gawk, exclaim, and create an intrusive row,
reproducing what they have learned through the reproduction of disability
repudiation within horror. Thanks to
this depiction, we disabled are the abhorrent possibilities of the body that have
been manufactured as a malignancy upon society.
According to Kristeva (2010):
“Disability confronts
[Non-disabled persons] with the limits of life, with the fear of
deficiency…disability therefore awakens a catastrophic anxiety that intern
leads to defensive reactions of rejection, indifference or arrogance, when not
the will to eradicate by euthanasia.” (33)
Through this prism, the
disabled are the cautionary tales of abnormal social and cultural behavior for non-disabled
people. We become horror for them, real life boogeymen. Think about the way
people recoil in disgust and fear from burn victims because they’ve been
saturated with images of Freddy Kreuger’s malevolence; or are paralyzed with
shock and fear in front of a person with Spina bifita, because they have seen The
Grudge or The Ring. Horror becomes the socialization mechanism by
which non-disabled experience disability the most. This results in Horror films
becoming a social learning tool, that is not refuted and corrected through
common everyday interactions nondisabled people have with the disabled. This is
because for many, the disabled are not the non-disabled’s doctors, teachers, or
lawyers. The only way we are seen for most non-disabled people, is through the
depictions they see on screen. This becomes problematic when most images
non-disabled people see of the disabled is in the context of a horror film. This
association becomes further complicated with the use of disabled actors in these
roles, or contortionists, and other flexibly trained individuals, to depict the
arbitrative images. There is also something tragically ironic the way that the
industry will choose extremely athletic bodies, with the ability to distort and
warp their form into ways depicting disability, rather than hire those with disabilities
themselves.
The “Subversion” of
Disability in Horror
All depictions of disability
malice in Horror films obfuscates the horrific realities of violence against
disabled people, including the frequency of abuse from caregivers and family
members. Unlike the gluttonous number of images establishing disability as perpetrators
of horror violence, the truth is that they are almost always the victim (Hall
2016). Thus, with a subtle shift of focus from the individual to the group or
collective, we can understand that the notions of horror and disability can be
recontextualized through the social model of disability; resulting in the horror
being the system in which the disabled live within, rather than the disabled
themselves.
Foucault (1999)
recontextualizes “Monstrosity”, often used as an adjective for disability, in
its existence and form to be a violation of societal laws and the laws of
nature; highlighting it is the way that these systems (particularly the law and
medical fields) perceive, interpret, and impose themselves on the disabled,
categorizing them as other, and aberrations of the non-disabled allowing for
their normalization.
“One
of the first Ambiguities is that the monster is the breach of the law that
automatically stands outside of the law…the monster falls under what in general
terms could be called the framework of politico-judicial powers [that is] a
transgression of the natural limit, of the law-table, to fall under or in any
rate challenge an interdiction of civil and religious or divine law….
Disability is not monstrosity because it has a place in civil or cannon law…Monstrosity,
therefore, is simply an irregularity, a slight deviation, but one that makes
possible something that really will be a monstrosity [The monstrosity of
systems] (p56-73)
Hall (2016) points out that if we use the social model
of disability[3],
which focuses on how the environment contributes to, and exacerbates
impairments, in our analysis of horror films, this can subvert a lot of the disability
stereotypes in horror films, shifting from the malevolence of a specific
disabled person to the evil of a broken system. This can function to humanize horror
antagonists, and instead, identify the society and its systems as the real
villain (Hall 2016).
In newer Horror films of the late 2010-2020’s,
there has been a visible shift away from the singularly malicious individual disabled
villain; replaced by social ills that impose themselves on individuals
throughout various social mechanisms. Particularly, the horror films of Jordan
Peele depict the cancer of racism and classism in brilliant allegories on
slavery, rape, and labor exploitation. Yet,
even in these films that take a more social approach; the otherness of the antagonists,
allegorical to various inequities or not, is still physically represented by
deformity and disability. Whether that being burned, or not having the ability
to speak (as in Us) or a skin disease being representative of the
corruption of evil (Candyman 2021) disability instead of representing
internal maliciousness and lack of morality as it has in the past, in the more
recent horror films, disability is instead used as an allegory for the
corruption of a broken social system. This gets further complicated when these
new horror films successfully provide strong social commentary that reforms and
rationalizes the horror antagonists’ actions. Thus, the film, to maintain a villain
status for their disabled antagonist, must make them eviler than the unequal
mechanisms that created them.
An example of a film
franchise that doubles down on the wicked virulence of its disabled antagonist,
above the social conditions they contend with; is the Don’t Breathe franchise.
Norman Nordstrom is a blind Military vet (Played by non-disabled actor Stephen
Lang) who is beset in his home by delinquents that break in looking to steal
his valuables. Throughout the majority of the first film’s first two acts,
audiences are siding with Norman as he dispatches the intruders in self-defense.
However, in order to have the audience begin to identify with the protagonists,
and follow the
final girl trope , the
film has a third act reveal of Norman eventually killing a young girl, who he
had previously restrained and raped in order to produce and replace the
daughter that he lost in a car accident.
Unfortunately, as the
examples above attest, the subversion of disability through horror is only
changing the allegory of the impairment used when depicting disabled
antagonists in horror films. Rather than a representation of immorality and
evilness, new horror films use the disabled body to comment on social
inequality, stratification, and other ills. This conversation with the horror
audience through its antagonists, while more nuanced than in the horror films
of the past, are still playing out on the bodies of disabled people, which does
not change the perception of disabled people, only what they are now
representing in the current social and political context.
The relationship between Capitalism,
Horror and Disability
Horror,
Disability and Financial Capital
There is an understanding in the filmmaking industry, that Horror films are often cheap to produce, but always make money. Many well renowned and celebrated directors, from James Cameron, Stephen Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Jon Carpenter, Karyn Kusama, Sam Raimi, and David Cronenberg to David E. Kelley, M. Night Shyamalan and James Wan have all started out in the horror genre. It is a Hollywood understanding that if you make a well received horror film cheaply, you can usually secure your next film project. This near “sure thing” profitability leads to the Blumhouse model of filmmaking. The film production company of Jason Blum, Blumhouse Productions, has formulized the profitability of the horror film. By keeping the budgets of the film relatively low (between 10-15 million dollars) the primal desire of feeling fear in an entertaining way, allows for the ballooning of profits through the domestic and international markets. Ma, a 2019-Blumhouse release starring Octavia Spencer, had a poultry budget of 5 million dollars with a return of 65 million. Halloween (2018) with a budget of just over 10 million dollars, grossed 255 million, whereas The Invisible Man (2019) with a budget of 7 million dollars grossed over 147 million. Even during economic and industry down turns, Horror films have always been able to survive through there adherence to the most basic of capitalist principles: cheap costs and high profits. Unfortunately, the adherence to a particular formula (especially a capitalistic one) results in a fall back upon some of the disability tropes that were popularized by Lon Cheney at the turn of the 20th century. Thus, many of these popular and profitable films are continually ingrained with the common disabled trope of “The Obsessive Avenger” well into the 21st century.
The Cultural and Social
Capital of Horror and Disability
Because
of the profitability of the horror genre in general, and the stereotypes of
disability that go along with it, many disabled actors often find themselves in
horror films. For example, actor Warwick Davis, born with a rare form of Dwarfism,
must develop forms of cultural and social capital unique to his disability,
parlaying it into a career in horror, science fiction and fantasy films. Davis
has been the titular Leprechaun in its film franchise spanning 10 years
(1993-2003). Additionally, several disabled people have cultivated social
capital through organizations, companies, and subsects of various trade unions,
to assist with accessibility issues and discrimination claims.
Regardless of this social
capital support, the cultural value of disability experience (disability
capital) is not valued, as most depictions of disability are often portrayed by
non-disabled actors. Not only is this maintaining disability stereotypes
(through inaccurate portrayals by non-disabled people) but it is often
reinforced through the high probability of those roles being rewarded
by critics, academies and associations alike. The data shows
(see link) that a disabled role increases the likelihood of a non-disabled
actor’s win to nearly 50%. The message
here is clear, audiences do not want to understand the actual disability
experience. They would much rather experience it through the filter of a
non-disabled actor, whose portrayal is easier for them to swallow.
The normalization of
non-disabled actors playing disabled characters also reinforces the nonvalue of
sexual or erotic capital of the disabled body.
The body presentation of non-disabled people in disabled roles gives a
false perception of what disabled bodies look like. This maintains that sexual
attraction and sexuality only be understood through the prism of the
non-disabled; especially if the role they are portraying is of a disabled
person. This also reinforces the
stereotype that people with disabilities are not sexual beings, that they do
not have sex or sexual desires. Pornstar
Academic Loree Erickson (2013) states that our culture is so saturated by
images that narrowly define sex and the desirability of bodies, that most
disabled people are excluded. “Shame is often deployed as a political resource that
some people [usually non-disabled] use to isolate others [usually disabled
people]” (Erickson 2013:323). If
Disabled people are the protagonists in horror films, it is assumed that they
will not survive. They will be the subject of a supernatural entity’s ire, sacrifice
themselves, or if they do miraculously survive, it is usually through luck, and
or neglect from the film’s antagonist. They also are not depicted as being
sexually desirable (a common trope especially for women in the Horror genre),
nor are they often the hero.
The one minor exception
to this non heroic trope of the disabled is in the A Quiet Place duology,
where the secret to defeating the aliens is found in the feedback created by
one of the main character’s hearing aids.
While this avoids the typical disability trope in horror films of the
disability representing the immorality and malevolence of the antagonist, and
the character, Regan Abbot is welcomely portrayed by deaf actress Millicent
Simmons, it falls into one of the other disability tropes in film known as the “Super
Crip”; that by the nature of being disabled, a character has a special ability
that allows them an advantage against the antagonist at some point in the film.
Symbolic Capital and a Marxian
Reading of the Slasher Horror Genre.
One of the lesser-known
points of Marx’s critique of Capitalism, is that a lot of the social norms and
values we become socialized to, internalize, and pass down from one generation
to another, is a part of a larger system of social control to maintain the
labor force. We’ve witnessed this with
the internalized cultural and social norms of homeownership, courtship rituals,
processes of entering the institution of marriage, and the workforce being a
conduit for healthcare, measurement of success, and a source of identity
self-fulfillment.
The media as one of the
agents of socialization, and more narrowly film, has contributed to these
values and ideals by propagating them in entertaining forms of easily
digestible content; which allow for the labor force, and several different
institutions, to remain populated. It is through TV and film that we recruit
soldiers into the military, keep and bring in politicians into office with
campaign advertisements, and religious institutions afloat through Sunday
programming. However, it is the economy that the media supports the most; not
only through the direct production and consumption of content which accounts
for the Billions of our 7 trillion GDP, but in the way in which the media
reinforces and helps to reproduce the labor force. All of the important
cultural norms in maintaining and reproducing the labor force (Homeownership,
marriage, and the value of the workforce) are presented in almost all media
content, regardless of genre. However, it is the Horror Genre that is the most
subtle in its re-creation of these norms.
The typical arc of a
horror film, or film franchise (especially the slasher sub-genre) begins with
the depiction of a white middle to upper class utopia of capitalism. While they
may create some nuances of class and racial differences between their protagonists,
it is usually this idealism that is returned to, or at least attempted to be
returned to, by the end of the film. The
second act usually disrupts the idyllic capitalist utopia (at least at the
individual level) by causing the protagonists to reevaluate their life in the
context of an antagonist threat. The antagonist is usually not only a disabled person
presented in horrific fashion, but they are often representations of the lower
class or manifestations of the class fears felt by the protagonists. However,
by film’s end, the middle/upper class white capitalist utopia is upheld through
the eradication of its lower class disabled villain, if only for a time. All of the classic Slasher antagonists from
Freddy, Jason, and Michael to newer versions like GhostFace from the Scream
franchise (in which Wes Craven is leaning on the Horror tropes he set decades
earlier), follow this model. They reproduce the symbolic capital of whiteness
and middle to upper class norms in their resolution of the story by a return to
the idyllic setting (outside of a stinger for the next film in the franchise)
of a white capitalist utopia through the annihilation of a disable antagonist; while
also eliminating
any or all protagonists of color. While
thankfully the trope of Black death in horror films is changing, and there are
some slasher films that are attempting to recontextualize Black pain (Candyman
2021), The disabled are still left behind to be the general antagonist, or the
thing of nightmares, for every new generation that watches these films, or
repackages them into new content.
CONCLUSION
The
intersections of disability and capitalism among horror antagonists point to a
film culture that reinforces dangerous disability stereotypes generated in the
early part of the 20th century with continual reproduction through the new millennium.
While there have been attempts to subvert the horror genre from many of its own
tropes, disability is still used as a framing device for immorality, debauchery,
and malevolence. The maintenance of disability in this way generates various forms
of capital, whether that be the financial capital acquired by the studios that
produce horror films, or the cultural and social capital of the perception of disability
in the larger society. All of this results in a mechanism of social control, that
through each horror film, seeks to validate and reproduce a white capitalist
Utopia for the purposes of maintaining the labor force. While it is disconcerting that, once again,
the relationship between disability and capitalism results in the alienation
and exploitation of Disabled people in yet another industry, perhaps if we have
more Disabled people produce content, especially in the horror genre, then the
stories that are told about the Disabled, even those with bile, blood, brains,
and viscera, will be more accurate, and thus, be far more compelling than what
we have now.
REFERENCES
Bourdieu,
Pierre 1987. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. New
York: Harvard University Press
Erickson,
Loree 2013. “Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It.” In The
Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure eds. Tristan
Taormino, Celine Parrenas, Constance Penley, Mireille Miller Young. New York:
The Feminist Press.
Foucault,
Michel 1999. Abnormal: Lectures at the College De France 1974-1975. New
York: Picador.
Green,
Adam I. 2008. “The Social Organization of Desire: The Social Field’s Approach.”
In Sociological Theory 26 (1) pp25-50.
Hall,
Malinda 2016. “Horrible Heroes: Liberating Alternative Visions of Disability in
Horror.” In Disability Studies Quarterly 36 (1) retrieved at https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3258/4205
Retrieved on 9/28/2021
Kristeva,
Julia 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Trans. Leon S.
Roudiez New York: Columbia University Press.
________
2010. Hatred and Forgiveness. Trans.
Jeanine Herman New York: Columbia University Press.
Norden,
Martin 1993. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in
the Movies. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Swartz,
David 1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[1]
Originally from Bourdieu’s Fantastic book called Distinction
[2] An
offshoot of Bourdieu’s original forms of capital this controversial idea has
been bastardized by Catherine Hakim defining this as a personal asset afforded
to women through gender socialization. However, a feminist reading of this
points to the basic idea that women have been taught to use their erotic
capital as a tactic to access resources and power which are usually barred
(usually by white men). Thus, it is another form of social control to fracture
women’s social power. Additionally, women are taught to establish confidence
only though their erotic capital, and from that erotic capital more access and
power will come, which maintains their marginalization.[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-the-ideal-womans-body-looks-like-in-18-countries_us_55ccd2a6e4b064d5910ac3b0
[3] which
states that an individual’s environment
and social surroundings can cause, define, or exaggerate a person’s
impairment. This is done in many ways
throughout the social world. According to the social model, an impairment does
not become a disability until there is a limit to access to resources,
identifiers, and support. Thereby, a society disables a person when it fails to
provide adequate support needed for adequate existence within a culture
There are the limits of personal access to buildings,
parks and other public places, give opportunities or created barriers for work,
education and social participation (bio-power). A lack of accommodations
(captioning, sign language interpreters, brail in libraries It can create a culture that vilifies
disabled or condemns them as being subhuman in need of support and pity
reinforcing old and new types of discrimination and stigma. By removing
individualizing and stigmatizing representations of disability instead
representing disabled people as a minority group and having equal rights under
such distinction
