In horror, I often see myself reflected in its characters—stripped of agency, reduced to an object, something to be pursued, tormented, humiliated, and ultimately crushed. It feels hauntingly familiar. Because this is not just fiction for me—it’s a shadow cast by my own reality. Living with a severe physical disability means being utterly dependent on others for basic survival. Let me tell you what that dependence feels like: it is being carried, dressed, handled, fed, given water, having my nose scratched—not because I choose to, but because I physically cannot do these things for myself. It is living as operated—my body folded and unfolded like an existential origami (the origami unicorn?), my limbs occasionally rearranged, my chin dabbed with a napkin while I eat, my teeth brushed, and so on. Devoid of the ability to move, I wait patiently. I started learning patience very early on, like other kids learn how to ride a bike or sew. I must be moved and engineered. This is the definition and the mundane reality of an object.
Thus, to be an object is to exist in a state where every movement, every necessity of life, hinges on someone else. Most days, this is a quiet, uneasy balance—a social contract of care that holds my world together. But that contract, that fragile assurance of care, is not invincible. So when it falters, when mercy can no longer be counted on to survive, the terror becomes real. No, I need to qualify that. To be an object is to live in anticipatory terror.
It is a simple, yet inconvenient truth that a person may be good, decent, and... a person, until you radically subtract their ability to move, to take care of themselves. Then they become objects. Surely, some objects are culturally prized, if we think of terms like arm candy or trophy wives, as demeaning as that may be. But I am talking about something a lot more literal and some objects are to be discarded in the blink of an eye.
Maybe the original plea, to borrow from Emmanuel Levinas, was not a cry for analgesia—relief from pain, but rather a simple whisper, "Don’t hurt me." But perhaps it was always more complex, always darkened by an understanding that a girl gets hurt either way.
There’s a particular horror in knowing that my survival depends not on my own will or strength but on the mercy of others. Mercy—a word that is supposed to carry so much weight, yet is so precariously dependent on the goodwill, the ethical resolve of caregivers, of society itself. But what happens if mercy runs out?
This isn’t a distant, theoretical fear; it’s a visceral reality I live with. The thought that my life could be extinguished at another’s whim, with no power to resist, is a chilling truth, indelible. It’s the same helplessness I see in horror films—the protagonist under assault, defenseless, due to a force they cannot control, understand, or contain.
My very physicality alludes to what Andrea Cavarero describes as "a human essence that, deformed in its very being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization." In my own form, shaped by needs I cannot meet, I bear witness to a kind of horror that transcends fiction: the horror of being voiceless, moveless.
The terror doesn’t stop at extreme physical incapacitation. It digs deeper into the mind—the knowledge that no plea, no possible resistance, can alter the course once someone’s intent is set. How would I convey to the one who would do me harm me the necessity of necessity, the necessity of me, how do I possibly convince anyone that I have the right to go on being me? That stark, primal fear is one I carry daily and one that waits for me at night, a darkness within a darkness. And it’s a fear that lingers, one that horror films capture in their most brutal moments of objectification and dependency. For me, it’s not just a movie—it’s a black mirror.
I was born in a provincial town. At the age of two, I was diagnosed with a life-threatening form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Within the next few years, I lost the ability to walk. I lost the ability to hold a spoon. I lost the ability to lift a glass of water to my lips.
Thus began my social death—a death that would endure for a very long time. Abandonment is a scandal only when it is the living you leave behind. The dead do not count. The dead try to comprehend why suffering is so vast, but they do not count.
My mom, a very attractive, petite, and fiercely proud woman, taught me to hold my head high, even as the local kids hurled their worst insults at me whenever I dared to venture outside.
I was being killed by oblivion, by abandonment, by the prison of my apartment. The bright, wide-eyed disabled girl did not exist because she was unthinkable. I was unthinkable in my defiance, my intellect, and, worst of all, my sensuality. My life was forever determined by the many flights of stairs I could not climb, the elevators that were never built, the ramps leading to nowhere. I was immobilized, a walk of atonement in reverse.
This is where my fascination with the horror genre begins. As we read in the lush and terrific House of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse, “horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for... crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria.”
Disabled people are often seen as something that shouldn’t be, as objects whose impossible silent stare you instinctively avoid. There’s something about the presence of the disabled that unsettles—a feeling that we belong to a different plane of existence, one of muted suffering, of shamed visibility. I am an object, not a person, and the abject.
Discussing the giallo film Don’t Torture a Duckling, Alison Rumfitt writes, “[I]n that scene, as the witch is beaten, I saw myself. I felt more kinship with her than I ever had with a trans character, even one played by a trans actor. If we seek representation in art, are we seeking literal representation—people who look, talk, and feel like us—or something more elusive? I can’t speak for anyone else, and I know I’d adore more transgender roles on screen, but when I actually feel represented, it’s often by the female leads in particular horror films. Laura Palmer and Laura Dern in Inland Empire, women in trouble…”
I don’t like seeing women in distress. I am a woman in distress. I’ve been through phases where I was frightened of myself, of the fractured possibilities within my own mind. But who am I kidding? I am still frightened, every day, as those fractured pieces coil inside me like obsidianly dark vines. That experience is uncannily like the women in psychological horror films—their minds and the darkest recesses of their hearts forever under siege.
This is the most brutally honest explanation of why horror calls to me. Why Laura Palmer, for example, in the Questions In A World of Blue scene, resonates so deeply with me. She mourns herself, ever so furtively and briefly, because she already knows, “Tonight is the night that I die.” She allows herself that moment of grief before slipping back into her constructed identity, her power play, and she is so unbearably like me. More me than the rare disabled characters mainstream media half-heartedly attempts to portray. (The Netflix show Sex Education tried, but their disabled character sadly embodied nearly every stereotype.)
Why her? Why Twin Peaks? Laura’s story, after all, has nothing to do with severe physical disability or chronic pain. And yet, I can’t help feeling she understands what it is to be shamed, trapped, and absolutely, out-of-her-mind terrified. (More elusive representations are more interesting, after all.) Her self-loathing echoes my own. We all killed her! We all knew Laura was in trouble and we did nothing, screams Bobby at Laura's funeral. “She’s a living, breathing girl, and a complex, brutally honest character. For the first time [in Fire Walk With Me] we glimpse her strengths alongside her weaknesses—her loyalty and bravery even as years of abuse twist her into something she knows is wrong, corrupt.” The sheer horror of Laura’s situation is never sanitized. Her coldness, her self-serving actions, her promiscuity, her eventual suicidal despair—all are laid bare. And we are with her every step, drawn into her nightmare, sharing her fear, her desperation, her need to dominate and drag others down to her level. We understand her, even when she cannot understand herself.
Human rights are glorious, but only when you’re seen as human. I recognize that glint of contempt in Laura’s eyes, for those who fail to see her suffering, for those who simply don’t look hard enough. Because her story ends with death. (Or with a soul-crushing scream, that forever-jolt of terror, "the howl of howls," which is the only moral response to the violence and defilement she had endured) Laura was described as headstrong, impatient to live. And sometimes I feel too strong for most people, possessing a strength they find unnatural, unsettling. Once you’re seen as possessing unnatural strength, there’s no use fighting this perception. I endure and have been enduring more than human beings are supposed to. O Black Miracle, go home—wherever that is. O Miracle, leave us, because you make us feel weak, inadequate. You make everything worse. O Black Miracle, go out of this world, we’ve had enough of your goodness and the chill of your contempt.
Horror films are about a psyche under assault—the violence of trembling, of madness creeping from within: the sensory oversaturation of Suspiria by Dario Argento, the grief and terrible reversals in Don’t Look Now by Nicolas Roeg, the strange, Nordic gentleness of Lars von Trier's Medea and the wildness of Takashi Miike's Audition.
It is the liminal space between and the fatal ambiguity of agony and smile in Argento's Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the space between a mirror, a surreal painting, and the killer's face, all overlapping in a nightmarish moment in his terrific Deep Red.
Those who strip Twin Peaks: The Return of its historical context miss the point. Cooper’s final question, “What year is this?” speaks volumes. Laura’s very presence and the rift in the spatio-temporal fabric caused by nuclear weapons are inextricably connected. Lynch’s surrealism and nonlinear temporality often obscure this. The psyche, fractured into chunks of foreign matter, engaged in a relentless, if only imagined and mostly one-sided, dialogue between oppressor and oppressed, self-hate and hatred of others (expressed so powerfully in Rumfitt's horror novel Tell Me I'm Worthless)—this is historical, embodied, situated. I am the fluids and drippings, I am inferior, and I’ll prove it.
The spasm and shuddering of existence are my reality, more real than anything else I’ve encountered in cinema or literature. Adjani’s disconsoling, feral breakdown in Possession (1982)—that subway scene—isn’t just a moment of cinema. It’s a hinge of my existence. Except I am never leaving the subway or the Black Lodge.
I often think of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. It rings so true. The ending of Don’t Look Now is a perfect fusion of the uncanny and the horrific. It is the point of no return when you realize that mercy alone isn't enough to endure. It never has been. That final figure—“a non-child, an anti-cherub of mortality”—grinning as she slashes the throat, lingers like the recurring melody in Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography. The opposite of the shattering stained glass and collapsing body in Suspiria—one a whisper of decay, the other a scream and a fall.
Is that what I am to the “normals”? A cipher of black miracles, something that shouldn’t exist, that unsettles with her endurance? The shattering and lacerations (I am thinking of Frantz Fanon here, as the Black man is cut, again and again, with the blade in a black-gloved hand, when he first meets the gaze of the White man) of being dismissed as a mistake, an embodied anti-matter, impossible to relate to or understand.
(Of course, it’s harder to justify indifference when people realize how painfully relatable I actually am.)
There’s a particular horror in knowing that my survival depends not on my own will or strength but on the mercy of others. Mercy—a word that is supposed to carry so much weight, yet is so precariously dependent on the goodwill, the ethical resolve of caregivers, of society itself. But what happens if mercy runs out?
This isn’t a distant, theoretical fear; it’s a visceral reality I live with. The thought that my life could be extinguished at another’s whim, with no power to resist, is a chilling truth, indelible. It’s the same helplessness I see in horror films—the protagonist under assault, defenseless, due to a force they cannot control, understand, or contain.
My very physicality alludes to what Andrea Cavarero describes as "a human essence that, deformed in its very being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization." In my own form, shaped by needs I cannot meet, I bear witness to a kind of horror that transcends fiction: the horror of being voiceless, moveless.
The terror doesn’t stop at extreme physical incapacitation. It digs deeper into the mind—the knowledge that no plea, no possible resistance, can alter the course once someone’s intent is set. How would I convey to the one who would do me harm me the necessity of necessity, the necessity of me, how do I possibly convince anyone that I have the right to go on being me? That stark, primal fear is one I carry daily and one that waits for me at night, a darkness within a darkness. And it’s a fear that lingers, one that horror films capture in their most brutal moments of objectification and dependency. For me, it’s not just a movie—it’s a black mirror.
I was born in a provincial town. At the age of two, I was diagnosed with a life-threatening form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Within the next few years, I lost the ability to walk. I lost the ability to hold a spoon. I lost the ability to lift a glass of water to my lips.
Thus began my social death—a death that would endure for a very long time. Abandonment is a scandal only when it is the living you leave behind. The dead do not count. The dead try to comprehend why suffering is so vast, but they do not count.
My mom, a very attractive, petite, and fiercely proud woman, taught me to hold my head high, even as the local kids hurled their worst insults at me whenever I dared to venture outside.
I was being killed by oblivion, by abandonment, by the prison of my apartment. The bright, wide-eyed disabled girl did not exist because she was unthinkable. I was unthinkable in my defiance, my intellect, and, worst of all, my sensuality. My life was forever determined by the many flights of stairs I could not climb, the elevators that were never built, the ramps leading to nowhere. I was immobilized, a walk of atonement in reverse.
This is where my fascination with the horror genre begins. As we read in the lush and terrific House of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse, “horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for... crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria.”
Disabled people are often seen as something that shouldn’t be, as objects whose impossible silent stare you instinctively avoid. There’s something about the presence of the disabled that unsettles—a feeling that we belong to a different plane of existence, one of muted suffering, of shamed visibility. I am an object, not a person, and the abject.
Discussing the giallo film Don’t Torture a Duckling, Alison Rumfitt writes, “[I]n that scene, as the witch is beaten, I saw myself. I felt more kinship with her than I ever had with a trans character, even one played by a trans actor. If we seek representation in art, are we seeking literal representation—people who look, talk, and feel like us—or something more elusive? I can’t speak for anyone else, and I know I’d adore more transgender roles on screen, but when I actually feel represented, it’s often by the female leads in particular horror films. Laura Palmer and Laura Dern in Inland Empire, women in trouble…”
I don’t like seeing women in distress. I am a woman in distress. I’ve been through phases where I was frightened of myself, of the fractured possibilities within my own mind. But who am I kidding? I am still frightened, every day, as those fractured pieces coil inside me like obsidianly dark vines. That experience is uncannily like the women in psychological horror films—their minds and the darkest recesses of their hearts forever under siege.
This is the most brutally honest explanation of why horror calls to me. Why Laura Palmer, for example, in the Questions In A World of Blue scene, resonates so deeply with me. She mourns herself, ever so furtively and briefly, because she already knows, “Tonight is the night that I die.” She allows herself that moment of grief before slipping back into her constructed identity, her power play, and she is so unbearably like me. More me than the rare disabled characters mainstream media half-heartedly attempts to portray. (The Netflix show Sex Education tried, but their disabled character sadly embodied nearly every stereotype.)
Why her? Why Twin Peaks? Laura’s story, after all, has nothing to do with severe physical disability or chronic pain. And yet, I can’t help feeling she understands what it is to be shamed, trapped, and absolutely, out-of-her-mind terrified. (More elusive representations are more interesting, after all.) Her self-loathing echoes my own. We all killed her! We all knew Laura was in trouble and we did nothing, screams Bobby at Laura's funeral. “She’s a living, breathing girl, and a complex, brutally honest character. For the first time [in Fire Walk With Me] we glimpse her strengths alongside her weaknesses—her loyalty and bravery even as years of abuse twist her into something she knows is wrong, corrupt.” The sheer horror of Laura’s situation is never sanitized. Her coldness, her self-serving actions, her promiscuity, her eventual suicidal despair—all are laid bare. And we are with her every step, drawn into her nightmare, sharing her fear, her desperation, her need to dominate and drag others down to her level. We understand her, even when she cannot understand herself.
Human rights are glorious, but only when you’re seen as human. I recognize that glint of contempt in Laura’s eyes, for those who fail to see her suffering, for those who simply don’t look hard enough. Because her story ends with death. (Or with a soul-crushing scream, that forever-jolt of terror, "the howl of howls," which is the only moral response to the violence and defilement she had endured) Laura was described as headstrong, impatient to live. And sometimes I feel too strong for most people, possessing a strength they find unnatural, unsettling. Once you’re seen as possessing unnatural strength, there’s no use fighting this perception. I endure and have been enduring more than human beings are supposed to. O Black Miracle, go home—wherever that is. O Miracle, leave us, because you make us feel weak, inadequate. You make everything worse. O Black Miracle, go out of this world, we’ve had enough of your goodness and the chill of your contempt.
Horror films are about a psyche under assault—the violence of trembling, of madness creeping from within: the sensory oversaturation of Suspiria by Dario Argento, the grief and terrible reversals in Don’t Look Now by Nicolas Roeg, the strange, Nordic gentleness of Lars von Trier's Medea and the wildness of Takashi Miike's Audition.
It is the liminal space between and the fatal ambiguity of agony and smile in Argento's Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the space between a mirror, a surreal painting, and the killer's face, all overlapping in a nightmarish moment in his terrific Deep Red.
Those who strip Twin Peaks: The Return of its historical context miss the point. Cooper’s final question, “What year is this?” speaks volumes. Laura’s very presence and the rift in the spatio-temporal fabric caused by nuclear weapons are inextricably connected. Lynch’s surrealism and nonlinear temporality often obscure this. The psyche, fractured into chunks of foreign matter, engaged in a relentless, if only imagined and mostly one-sided, dialogue between oppressor and oppressed, self-hate and hatred of others (expressed so powerfully in Rumfitt's horror novel Tell Me I'm Worthless)—this is historical, embodied, situated. I am the fluids and drippings, I am inferior, and I’ll prove it.
The spasm and shuddering of existence are my reality, more real than anything else I’ve encountered in cinema or literature. Adjani’s disconsoling, feral breakdown in Possession (1982)—that subway scene—isn’t just a moment of cinema. It’s a hinge of my existence. Except I am never leaving the subway or the Black Lodge.
I often think of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. It rings so true. The ending of Don’t Look Now is a perfect fusion of the uncanny and the horrific. It is the point of no return when you realize that mercy alone isn't enough to endure. It never has been. That final figure—“a non-child, an anti-cherub of mortality”—grinning as she slashes the throat, lingers like the recurring melody in Lacoue-Labarthe’s Typography. The opposite of the shattering stained glass and collapsing body in Suspiria—one a whisper of decay, the other a scream and a fall.
Is that what I am to the “normals”? A cipher of black miracles, something that shouldn’t exist, that unsettles with her endurance? The shattering and lacerations (I am thinking of Frantz Fanon here, as the Black man is cut, again and again, with the blade in a black-gloved hand, when he first meets the gaze of the White man) of being dismissed as a mistake, an embodied anti-matter, impossible to relate to or understand.
(Of course, it’s harder to justify indifference when people realize how painfully relatable I actually am.)
“She saw me as a sickness, so I became one,” says Ganja in the haunting Ganja & Hess (1973). There’s something mesmerizing in her defiance, her refusal to seek forgiveness. Her self-preservation is ancient, tribal. She wouldn’t end her life on the cross, wouldn’t beg for divine mercy. Seen as disease, she chose to become disease.
Every psyche on the verge of collapse is a shattered mirror, a thousand fragmented eyes staring back at me. The swirling gazes of revulsion, curiosity, incomprehension, and fear—they trap me in their perverse amber.
Horror, for me, isn’t about goosebumps or lost sleep. It’s about watching someone unravel, knowing you’ve unraveled too, knowing the difference between damaged and broken, and inhabiting the liminal dusk in-between. It’s about feeling less alone.
Every psyche on the verge of collapse is a shattered mirror, a thousand fragmented eyes staring back at me. The swirling gazes of revulsion, curiosity, incomprehension, and fear—they trap me in their perverse amber.
Horror, for me, isn’t about goosebumps or lost sleep. It’s about watching someone unravel, knowing you’ve unraveled too, knowing the difference between damaged and broken, and inhabiting the liminal dusk in-between. It’s about feeling less alone.
The thing is, though, the cracks in the floor of the mind are perfectly capable of taking a life of their own. The traumatized are unpredictable because we know we can survive. I am unpredictable, which means an object of persecution and torment can sometimes morph into an object of fear.
Once, a friend took a picture of me. I was in my sturdy, black power wheelchair, with heavy leather wings, dark and geometric, shooting upward from my body/wheelchair. The wings were just part of the interior design inside a shopping mall. But once I stood beside them, the optical illusion of a delicate figure—etched feminine and true, rising proud and strong with her silver-studded leather wings—was complete. Inscrutable were my eyes, and merciless were my wings. The inside and the outside finally came together.
Do you hear the beating of the heavy wings in the air?
Well, do you?
Once, a friend took a picture of me. I was in my sturdy, black power wheelchair, with heavy leather wings, dark and geometric, shooting upward from my body/wheelchair. The wings were just part of the interior design inside a shopping mall. But once I stood beside them, the optical illusion of a delicate figure—etched feminine and true, rising proud and strong with her silver-studded leather wings—was complete. Inscrutable were my eyes, and merciless were my wings. The inside and the outside finally came together.
Do you hear the beating of the heavy wings in the air?
Well, do you?
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