In her 2018 essay titled “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me”—which was published in Uncanny Magazine’s September/October 2018 ‘Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction’ special edition—horror writer Zin E Rocklyn laments the ways her body makes her feel monstrous. As a Black, fat, disabled immigrant and queer woman living in the United States, there are many ways that people have been taught to fear her, even when she’s just minding her own business.
As such, she notes in the essay that she has come to empathise with many of Hollywood’s monsters. In many horror movies, the villains’ monstrosities are just cruel reskins of disability and injustice. For example, the “monstrous” people from movies like The Hills Have Eyes and the Wrong Turn series are victims of illegal radioactive waste dumping that leaves them and their offspring disabled and deformed. But they aren’t depicted as the victims of an environmental disaster. They are juxtaposed with the pretty white people wandering into their isolated territories, their differences making them dangerous threats to the people snooping in their backyard.
