TY - JOUR
T1 - Chariots of Fear: Empty Wheelchairs as a Locus of Horror, Disability, Race, and Eugenics in The Changeling and Jessabelle
AU - Dorwart, Jason B.
PY - 2024/10/13
Y1 - 2024/10/13
N2 - Wheelchairs inhabit an uncanny position between freedom and confinement, and between immobility and movement, making them a metaphorical locus of the embodiment of incorporeality. The wheelchair is a freeing tool for physically impaired users but becomes a marker for nondisabled persons’ fears of disability. The horror film genre uses physical markers of otherworldly fears to evoke a viscerally frightful response, often tapping into fears of impairment by using empty wheelchairs to embody imminent danger, foreboding, and the knowledge that death and disability loom. The empty wheelchair becomes a site for fantastical ghosts of all kinds to sit—including the ghost of the eugenics movement upon which so much of horror is rooted. This essay contends that as eugenics died out in popular discourse, its ghost remained and was exemplified in the changes that developed in the horror genre. The empty wheelchair suggests a problem-to-come, rather than a problem-to-be-overcome: the disabled body as liminal figure lacks futurity and lands the resultant ghost in the seat of the empty wheelchair as an endlessly liminal replay of trauma. Serving as a bridge between life and death, the wheelchair seems to be as reasonable a place as any for a ghost to sit while the spirit world bleeds through into materiality. The empty wheelchair becomes a locus of embodiment for the disembodied, suggesting a movement into a permanent state of liminality, rather than a movement out of it. As the marker of (non)disability is central to the capitalist enterprise of distribution of power and constraining unruly bodies into discrete and marginalized categories, the wheelchair becomes a marker of an inability to fully participate in the ways of capitalism, a social defect leading ultimately to ostracization and premature death. This essay analyzes The Changeling (1980) and Jessabelle (2014) to argue that in the absence of monstrous bodies, an empty wheelchair provides a seat for the ghost of eugenic horrors while attempting to avoid overt depiction of monstrous and eugenically unfit bodies.
AB - Wheelchairs inhabit an uncanny position between freedom and confinement, and between immobility and movement, making them a metaphorical locus of the embodiment of incorporeality. The wheelchair is a freeing tool for physically impaired users but becomes a marker for nondisabled persons’ fears of disability. The horror film genre uses physical markers of otherworldly fears to evoke a viscerally frightful response, often tapping into fears of impairment by using empty wheelchairs to embody imminent danger, foreboding, and the knowledge that death and disability loom. The empty wheelchair becomes a site for fantastical ghosts of all kinds to sit—including the ghost of the eugenics movement upon which so much of horror is rooted. This essay contends that as eugenics died out in popular discourse, its ghost remained and was exemplified in the changes that developed in the horror genre. The empty wheelchair suggests a problem-to-come, rather than a problem-to-be-overcome: the disabled body as liminal figure lacks futurity and lands the resultant ghost in the seat of the empty wheelchair as an endlessly liminal replay of trauma. Serving as a bridge between life and death, the wheelchair seems to be as reasonable a place as any for a ghost to sit while the spirit world bleeds through into materiality. The empty wheelchair becomes a locus of embodiment for the disembodied, suggesting a movement into a permanent state of liminality, rather than a movement out of it. As the marker of (non)disability is central to the capitalist enterprise of distribution of power and constraining unruly bodies into discrete and marginalized categories, the wheelchair becomes a marker of an inability to fully participate in the ways of capitalism, a social defect leading ultimately to ostracization and premature death. This essay analyzes The Changeling (1980) and Jessabelle (2014) to argue that in the absence of monstrous bodies, an empty wheelchair provides a seat for the ghost of eugenic horrors while attempting to avoid overt depiction of monstrous and eugenically unfit bodies.
UR - http://www.fantastic-arts.org/jfa/jfa-35-1/
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0897-0521
VL - 35
SP - 169
EP - 197
JO - Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
JF - Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
IS - 1
ER -