Portrayal of disability in horror
How many horror movies have you seen where the main villain is described as ‘crazy’ or ‘insane’? How often is it that you have villains covered in scars or with facial deformities? When you think of mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder or dissociative identity disorder, do you think of serial killers?
The inclusion of people with disabilities in horror media is not necessarily a new phenomenon, but it is one that people are starting to recognise. Audiences are quick to point out the importance of ‘representation’ in a film or TV show, but we also need to consider how these identities are being depicted. The majority of the time, when there are characters with disabilities in media, they are rarely portrayed as heroes. Instead, they are much more likely to be the villains whom audiences are rooting against.
This issue goes all the way back to the 1930s. One prominent example is Quasimodo in the 1923 film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Most people are aware of the Disney adaptation of this story, and the plot is mostly the same. Quasimodo is an example of a sympathetic ‘monster.’ Although he isn’t the story’s villain, the film clearly shows how people with disabilities were viewed at that time. One of the reviews of the film said that Quasimodo “is a creature of horror, a weird monstrosity of ape-like ugliness,” which is… not a fantastic thing to say about a person. Another example from the same time period is The Invisible Man (1933). The main character—a doctor—performs an experiment on himself that turns him invisible. However, the experiment turns him ‘insane’ and leads him to murder, thereby linking mental disorders to violent crimes and tying into the trope of the ‘mad scientist.’
Another aspect of this is the portrayal of psychiatric hospitals in various horror movies and video games. This
has been a common trope leading back to the 1800s and has been featured in multiple books, including Dracula, where one of the characters owns an “insane asylum.” Psychiatric hospitals, especially in the past, weren’t exactly places of comfort for the patients. The majority of the horror that is present in films that use this as a setting tends to be from the patients themselves. We are meant to be scared of the people in these hospitals and view them as monsters. This has led to real-life effects, with people avoiding seeking treatment in psychiatric hospitals due to the stigma that surrounds them.
One example of this is the movie Halloween (1978), directed by John Carpenter. The main antagonist, Michael Myers, escapes from a psychiatric hospital at the beginning of the film and has an undisclosed mental illness. Yet, people on the internet are obsessed with diagnosing him, including some people saying he has autism—because I guess being autistic means you’re a serial killer. This character was, in fact, based on a young boy Carpenter saw when he visited a psychiatric hospital for a class trip. In a documentary about the film, he described the look of the child: “It’s a schizophrenic stare, is what it is. It’s a real evil stare. And it was unsettling to me. It was like the creepiest thing I’d ever seen, just because it’s a stranger … he was completely insane.” This quote shows the complete lack of empathy Carpenter appears to have for this child and people with disabilities in general. Despite this, Halloween is considered one of the all-time best horror movies.
And this is still very much an issue today. The 2016 film Split features a man with dissociative identity disorder who has 23 different alters. The man kidnaps three girls and ends up killing two of them. One of the alters is only known as “The Beast,” who is a cannibal with superhuman strength. I don’t think it needs to be stated how this is an incredibly ableist take and how the film stigmatises dissociative identity disorder. Despite people with dissociative identity disorder and other similar disorders consistently portrayed as violent characters in TV and films, research has shown that people with these disorders are far more likely to hurt themselves than other people. Upon Split’s release, over 20,000 people signed a petition saying they would boycott the film. Despite this, the film grossed $278.5 million USD.
A more recent example is The Crowded Room (2023), a TV series that came out this year starring Tom Holland. This series is about a man arrested for murder, and it is later revealed that the character has dissociative identity disorder. This show is based on a true story about a man who pleaded “insanity” after committing various crimes and was eventually deemed innocent. Psychiatrists diagnosed him with dissociative identity disorder and said his alters committed the crimes, not him. This show is clearly perpetuating the idea that people with dissociative identity disorder are violent criminals who have no control over anything they do. (As a side note, if you look up ‘crowded room controversy,’ the majority of the results will be about a sex scene between Holland’s character and another man and not about the decision to have this show exist in the first place.)
So why is this such a big problem? Why are more people not speaking out against this? Why did The Crowded Room
still get released when there is a petition signed by 30,000 people asking Apple to cancel the show? The main issue with all of these films isn’t having people with disabilities in them, but instead how they’re shown. However, it’s not all bad news. People are becoming more aware of these ableist tropes and are working actively against them. We can only hope that eventually these terrible tropes are put to rest once and for all.
