Disability and Horror: A Companion
Call for Chapters
In Disability, Literature, Genre (2019), Ria Cheyne highlights that “both horror scholars and disability scholars have been reluctant to engage with disability in horror”, pointing to “the shared frequency with which problematic images of disability have appeared in the horror tradition”.[1] Kristen Lopez echoes this, writing that horror has “always been open to disabled characters and storylines … however, the interrelationship between disability and fear sells the idea that disability is something to shun or kill and plays on the fears disabled people have about themselves”.[2] Such echoes longstanding concerns in Critical Disability Studies, where culture has long been saturated with images of disability. Yet, those images are often rooted in “overheated symbolic imagery”.[3] As Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes, “from folktales and classical myths to modern and postmodern ‘grotesques’, the disabled body is almost always a freakish spectacle presented by the mediating narrative voice”.[4]
Even as horror has been reclaimed across different identity categories – queerness, especially – as operating foroutsiders, disability still remains outside. This tension captures Lennard J. Davis’ view that “diversity is the new normal,except for disability. There, … we equate difference with inferiority”.[5] Yet, the possibility of disability and horror continues. Regarding my own OCD, Jason Blackman’s horror short, Sit With Fear (2022), captured the day-to-day horror of the condition in a way that other genres often pacify. Cheyne writes that, from both critical perspectives, “the relationship between horror studies and disability, and disability studies and horror, is … one of mutual avoidance”.[6]Disability and Horror: A Companion aims to address this anxiety through a wide-reaching and inclusive analysis. The project will be a part of Peter Lang’s ‘Genre and Film Companion’ series.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:
- Establishing a canon of positive or negative disability representation in horror. For instance, Freaks (1932) or the association of slasher movie villains with impairment.
- Representations of specific conditions within horror media. For instance, blindness (Oddity), deafness (A Quiet Place), dementia (Relic), OCD (Sit With Fear), dwarfism (‘Hop-Frog’), neurodivergence (The Babadook), or depression (Smile). Alternatively, representations of ‘the norm’ within horror media.
- Mapping the history of disability through specific horror texts. For instance, reading the ‘rest cure’ alongside Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).
- International perspectives on disability and horror (e.g. Convenience Store Woman).
- Representations of the medical or social models of disability within horror fiction.
- Performing disability and horror on stage. For instance, Simon Stephens’ socially-distanced performance of José Saramago’s novel, Blindness (1995).
- The theoretical application of horror tropes to disability narratives, such as applying the doppelgänger to Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat (2008).
- The disabled child in horror fiction, such as in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025).
- Intersections with other approaches, such as gender studies or queer theory.
- Representations of disability in horror video games (Silent Hill 2), or the disabling of players through horror video game mechanics (Cling to Blindness).
- Any forms not listed above, such as graphic novels or podcasts.
Finished chapters will be approximately 3000 words, adopting a primary text to discuss the broader subject of disability and horror fiction. These submissions should adopt a particular frame of analysis, foregrounding the individual elements that distinguish the chosen work.
Please submit abstracts of 300 words, alongside a short biographical note (50–100 words), to Dr Michael Wheatley at [email protected] by July 31st. Draft chapters will then be expected for submission in late 2026.
[1] Ria Cheyne, Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction (Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, 2019), 30–31.
[2] Kristen Lopez, Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies (Bloomsbury Academic: New York and London, 2026), 109.
[3] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (The University of Michigan Press: Michigan, 2000), 16.
[4] Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (Colombia University Press: New York, 2017), 10.
[5] Elizabeth F. Emens, ‘Disabling Attitudes: U.S. Disability Law and the ADA Amendments Act’, The American Journal of Comparative Law (2014), 53.
[6] Cheyne, Disability, Literature, Genre, 34.