Tales from the cripped: representations of disability in North American horror cinema

Engineering notes

Key topics: autonomous driving, perception. See the paper for implementation details and experimental results.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为端到端自动驾驶、BEV感知、3D目标检测、轨迹预测、路径规划、LiDAR感知等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Disability has an uncomfortable ubiquity in the horror genre, with villains and victims making up the majority of these representations. While much scholarship continues to focus on gender and the final girl, and more recently has engaged with sexuality and race in horror, this thesis interrogates how ableist stereotypes have become ingrained in modern horror cinema with a particular focus on familial structures. Analysing the child/Adult Child, Mad Mother, then the wider, “deviant” family as a microcosm of perceptions of social “ills”, this thesis highlights the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender within these ableist trends in the genre through textual analysis. This research is intended to pick up where previous studies of disability in horror, such as Angela M. Smith’s 2012 monograph, have left off. As such, the films analysed here begin in the 1960s, but particular attention is paid to the most influential films in the genre, particularly those with extensive franchises and recent reboots. These are then compared throughout the thesis to recent horror from the 2020s to illustrate the continued prevalence of the disabled villain, and how it manifests differently across North American horror cinema. Centuries of fiction utilising disability as metaphor for social issues (Mitchel and Snyder, 2004: Susan Sontag, 1978) perpetuate false ideas about disability, particularly as it intersects with class, race, and gender, prevalent in eugenicist discourse, which continues in the genre and is internalised by disabled and non-disabled people alike, which this thesis aims to contest and unpack.

Links and sources

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