When your own body is the big screen monster

It's hard to forget one of the first disabled women I ever saw on the big screen. In the 1989 adaptation of Stephen King's novel, "Pet Sematary", Zelda (Andrew Hubatsek), the deceased sister of Rachel Creed (Denise Crosby), suffers from spinal meningitis. She is seen mostly in flashbacks, and Zelda becomes a literal, metaphorical ghost that haunts Rachel throughout the film. Zelda is skeletal, her spine is deformed.

To see Zelda in the film is to see a monster.

Growing up with a bone disability, Zelda completely terrified me, because I had no other women with disabilities, on screens big or small or anywhere else, to compare her to. For me, I wasn't just scared of Zelda because the movie portrayed her as a villain, I was scared because I feared that's what women with disabilities end up looking like. That this is how Iwas going to end.

Zelda is the example I cite most often, but the story of disabled women in horror has more Zeldas than most people realize. Unlike disabled men in horror, where characters from Frankenstein's Monster to Creature from the Black Lagoon are presented as tragic characters, female characters have little sense of the personal tragedy offered to them, are often portrayed only as victims and generally depends on how much emotion they seek to evoke (good or bad, both from other characters and from the audience itself).

The majority of disabled women in horror are in wheelchairs, like Joan Crawford in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" in 1962? Crawford is the film's only physically disabled character, and she is frequently victimized and tortured on all sides. Even her makeup is dull and unforgiving. Despite her appearance and her treatment, she is still the able-bodied Crawford sitting in a wheelchair.

Much of the portrayal of people with disabilities in film, regardless of genre, limits disabled characters to make able-bodied audiences comfortable. So, it is presumed that a valid audience will be put off by anyone lo...