I’ve been musing about writing a short horror story grounded in reality.
So often the horror genre makes the object of fear a disfigured man, a man with mental illness, a trans woman, someone living in poverty, someone with an accent, a black or brown person. It echoes the ableism, classism, white supremacy, and exceptionalism of the dominant culture. If it’s not this, then it relies on the made up – ghosts, aliens – or is set in the past.
The agent of horror is never that suburban cishet white person doing the normal things they do in today’s world. It’s a missed opportunity because they can be plenty scary.
Take the little horrors trans people experience every day. It’s terrifying walking by a group of young men when young men have a history of harassing you for fun, or threatening you, and you’ve been sexually assaulted by a pedestrian before for being trans. It’s terrifying being in a washroom with other women, especially kids, when it’s constantly communicated by government officials and media how trans women are predators and you’ve had a woman tell you to get out before. It’s terrifying being in the store to buy clothes when associates have followed you and told you you don’t belong. It’s petrifying being under a laser for laser hair removal, and the esthetician then goes on a transphobic rant after reading your file and learning you take estrogen. It’s scary going to the beach or a pool and its change rooms. It’s terrifying going to surgery without any information about the procedure. It’s scary to go on HRT not knowing what it’ll end up like. It’s scary not being on HRT and watching your body change. It’s terrifying for trans youth to live with religious parents who might disown them. It’s terrifying for trans youth to go to schools where they’re bullied with no agency to leave. It’s terrifying going through first puberty when you have dysphoria and cis people are gatekeeping.
Trans people are not alone in this. Other groups pushed to the edge of society experience fear regularly because of the actions of affluent suburban cishet white people. Part of why Jordan Peele’s Get Out was transgressive is because it flipped this dynamic. Same with Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum.
You don’t need a clawed disfigured man to make something horrifying. You don’t need a poltergeist. You just need a Karen who is on the PTA. That’s the kind of campfire tale I want to consume.
Cover image is of Buffalo Bill, the antagonist of Silence of the Lambs. The character murders women to skin them to “become” one. Trans women in horror films have exclusively been portrayed as deviants and serial killers, while in reality trans women – almost always trans women of colour – are murdered by cisgender people.