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Disability in Horror: Where Are We Now?
For Disability Pride Month, mistress of the dark Corinne Pollard laments the lack of authentic and appropriate disability representation in horror.
‘It’s a miracle!’
After a wheelchair user stands up in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025), this punchline got the laughs from the cinema’s audience, but not from me. Instead, I repressed my tears because I was overjoyed. You may consider it to be just a joke but to me it was so much more. I consider it to be a true onscreen disability representation which has been missing from the filming industry for too long.
The sad thing is, Wake Up Dead Man, while it has its spooky and tense moments, isn’t a horror. And that’s what I’m truly missing—a horror with great disability representation.
Cailee Spaeny in Wake Up Dead Man. Source: IMDB
When you look back in horror, consider how disability is presented. Wheelchair users can’t run from serial killers, anyone with grotesque facial features hide under a mask, disabled protagonists must learn to overcome their disability to survive, and so on. Disability has been shown time and again as a tool for horror. Is it any wonder that people are afraid to become disabled?
The world is changing, thankfully. Awareness is spreading that anyone disabled can have a life. It isn’t something to be feared and therefore it is NOT a horror story. It is a different way of life that, to quote Bear Grylls, we “improvise, adapt, and overcome” in our own way. My husband adds that “if life was a game, disabled people are playing on hard mode,” which has stopped me in my tracks a lot from pushing through when I’m already at my limit.
I don’t think horror has caught up yet…
Horror films still use disabled characters for shock value and it’s a misrepresentation. For example, Midsommar (2019) has a disabled character called Ruben whose appearance and unresponsive mentality is used to symbolize the commune’s inbreeding and cruel practices, while Dani’s sister’s diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder is given as the reason why she murdered herself and their parents. Another example is Hereditary (2018) in which Milly Shapiro plays a disabled character while actually disabled herself with cleidocranial dysplasia (CCD), but the film uses her disability to boost the horror of alienation and family dysfunction instead of portraying her real condition in a sensitive manner.
Horror films also use disability as survival assets. Remember A Quiet Place (2018)? It ticks a lot of the disability boxes of real representation, it portrays silence in a negative manner that the characters tolerate and then uses deafness as an asset for survival, using an implant to get rid of the monster. Medicine is shown as the hero, not the deaf girl. There’s a trope of disability being seen as something that can and should be fixed.
Another example is Bird Box (2018) where characters blindfold themselves to survive, reducing disability to a horror plot device or a ‘superpower’.
The film doesn’t show real representation and on top of that it sparked an online trend known as the Bird Box Challenge. People injured themselves and even lost their lives by blindfolding themselves and attempting dangerous tasks!
Indie horror books lead the way (sort of)
As for horror books, I’d say indie horror has begun to gather a great range, but it is difficult to find them. The amount of horror with no disability representation outweighs the ones that do, and that means the algorithm will show horror books without disabled characters.
In mainstream publishing, I think it is rarer still. When I try to recall a horror novel with disability representation, I go blank—and I hate it.
Go to your Waterstones, your Blackwells, and find one yourself. Yeah, almost impossible, right? Unless you’re in the know, you’re more likely to buy a horror with no mention of disability.
I do however have some recommendations. I stumbled across a disabled character in Grady Hendrix’s The Final Girl Support Group and I shrieked with joy.
Julia, a wheelchair user who survived falling from a window, is an intellectual you’ll enjoy.
It is worth noting though that she is not the main protagonist.
Nat Cassidy’s Nestlings is described as Rosemary’s Baby meets Salem’s Lot. We meet Ana, a parent who has become paralysed after the complicated birth of her first child..
Nestlings comes to the UK in October which means — yes— I haven’t read it. Due to split international publishing rights, Nestlings wasn’t published at the same time in the UK, so most of this recommendation is coming from other book reviews.
While Ana is a wheelchair user, no one pities her as she is a character who fights to live. I’m looking forward to reading it.
Another on my TBR list is You Weren’t Meant to be Human by Andrew Joseph White, which is a dystopian horror about the human race surviving an alien invasion. There’s a portrayal of marginalized people living in a hostile world and what they must do to survive. While this sounds like right up my alley, there’s content warnings for unclear sexual boundaries, rape, domestic abuse, and sexual fantasies involving abuse which has me hesitating. The story follows Crane, a trans man, who becomes pregnant by a cult member, Levi, and the Hive then forces Crane to carry the pregnancy.
Lastly on my TBR list is Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle, which is about an ‘effective’ demonic gay conversion camp and a young woman called Rose who is looking for love. Rose is autistic, and as the author is autistic too, the representation feels more authentic as Rose’s diagnosis is used by her family and her church to push her into thinking she is broken.
Where can we go from here?
I think we’re beginning to make a little progress for disability in horror. In my mind, I’d love to see more horror books on shelves in every Waterstones with disabled protagonists who accept their disability and strive to live against the horror that the novel has sprung upon them.
There needs to be more representation and more inclusion for disabled authors, too. Other genres such as fantasy have started to show disability in popular books and bestsellers. For example, The Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros (including Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, and Onyx Storm) is the perfect example with the journey of Violet Sorrengail, who is disabled with a condition modelled after Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS).
Other genres are doing this, so why can’t horror?
Got recommendations for great examples of disability in horror film, TV or books? Add them in the comments ⬇️
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One response to “Disability in Horror: Where Are We Now? ”
The ‘a Quiet APOCALYPSE’ book series has been well received by the Deaf Community, and is now endorsed by International Deaf activist and Emmy nominated producer Nyle DiMarco.