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Building on my answer in Proven psychological or scientific means of scaring people?, I'm working on a universal horror-theme structure for a branching-narrative series with an occult detective. I won't discuss the whole system, but the idea is that each story has multiple themes that progress incrementally. Choices take the reader deeper down a particular horror scenario, with branches to other juxtaposed themes.

One of my universal horror themes is strong, but problematic.

Body Horror – this theme is a problem because it plays into universal fears of aging, disability, amputation, disease, birth defects, injury, bad plastic surgery.... It's a legitimate horror theme that I can see escalating to its logical conclusion. Examples are Stephen King's Thinner, and Tod Browning's Freaks.

I don't see a PC way to handle body horror tropes. I don't think horror needs to be PC, but a recent lecture about zombies by a guy in a wheelchair has made me question the whole theme as reenforcing a bad message. Nearly every body horror idea I run through my system reflects real world ablism, or a hierarchy that body-shames real people.

I'm not trying to be PC police of an entire genre. Body horror is legitimately scary. I would rather be able to tap into it.

How can I portray body horror and still be sensitive to people with disabilities?

We have visceral fears about our bodies coming to harm or being consumed. Disease, decay, and body revulsion seem like a big part of horror, definitely one of the few universal fears that everyone shares. I've only identified 8 universal fears – losing 1 knocks out a lot of story possibilities. I could limit it to metaphor and abstraction (a decaying house), but it's not visceral and personal like the body.

Body horror is also the theme that sometimes knocks me out of the genre. Films like Saw become just so much torture porn. I wouldn't indulge in gore, but still the threat and consequences of physical harm works as a logical escalation of a horror theme. Horror without consequences is like Scooby-Doo.

Can I raise the stakes in a body horror theme in a way that avoids an inherently ableist message? Can I tap into this anxiety without simultaneously punching-down on real life disabled, sick, and differently-bodied people? This is not about putting a hero in a wheelchair to make an empowering statement. Rather this is about leveraging a particular universal fear, without crapping on people who already have it rough.

If you want to be PC, stick to symptoms of infectious diseases, where the sense of body horror would reinforce prevention and be justified as a mean towards avoiding contagion.

As the OP suggests, body horror is about body transformations that go in undesired directions. Thanks to evolution, and sometimes thanks to human activity, we have a very large pool of examples, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_congenital_disorders

The list is even longer if we consider diseases that can be acquired during the course of life, and human interventions such as prosthetics from centuries past, and some plastic surgery.

Political correctness is aimed at avoiding forms of expression that exclude or marginalize certain groups of disadvantaged people. There are however some groups of people that are necessarily excluded from normal interactions with the rest of society. These are people with very contagious and lethal diseases. For the normal, medically untrained individual, to be able to recognize the symptoms of such diseases and avoid them is actually a desirable goal.

I think that body horror that would play on the physical symptoms of these diseases would not just be politically correct, but also desirable as a mean toward a form of contagion prevention. In addition, our mind is probably tuned to feel disgust and horror towards the most obvious of such symptoms. Even more so, it would be natural to feel very scared after finding such sings on one own's body. Play on them, exaggerate them, make sure that your readers can feel the horror, and in a sense you'll be even doing a service to mankind.

Some examples, not for the faint of heart:

black plague,
Zygomycosis,
Certain fungal infections,
Peruvian warts, and
Syphilis, Smallpox & Co.

Having a villain lop off an arm or leg ought not offend someone who either was born without them or lost them due to accident or combat. Losing limbs is not desirable.

I have some disabled friends. One has told me on multiple occasions that he envies me my kidneys. One complaint I hear is people treat him differently. They treat him like he is disabled.

There are jerks and wonderful people who are disabled. Being dismissive of their status as human beings and treating them as though they are special is more likely to offend.

I have two things that some call disabilities;a permanently injured ankle due to a car accident and epilepsy. I am not disabled by them, so they are not disabilities.

Fears are valid themes. Hitchcock would take a single fear, so would Poe. Some fears were exotic, others more universal.

Fear of dismemberment can be more visceral than fear of death as it encapsulates a fear of losing one’s independence. With death, it is all over but anything less than that is survived and such survival and the adaptations required can be terrifying.

I knew a man who thought because he was in a wheelchair, his life was over. I told him it was just another way to get around - same thing I told my mother when she became wheelchair bound after a stroke and heart attack.

When I was recovering from the car accident, I was temporarily wheelchair bound. This man thought I was done for because of the wheelchair. Later, when I walked in to visit him, he did not recognize me. I was supposed to be in a wheelchair.

Disabled people fear losing functionality as much as anyone else. Perhaps even more so, because they need to rely on existing functional parts more strongly than others do.

What you want to avoid is putting a value on it. For example, losing a limb is awful and creates huge challenges in performing tasks of everyday living, transportation, and may require changing careers. No one is going to dispute this. You can show all that. You can show the fear of going through that. Just avoid judgements like "no man would want her now" or "his life was no longer worth living."

You can use disability as a starting point as well (hopefully you'll have some disabled characters in there). No one would want an accident that makes them deaf, for instance, but for someone who is already blind, the very idea of it would be terrifying beyond belief. Someone who is already Deaf would be far more horrified at the idea of losing a hand than someone who is hearing.

An additional disability can be easier for someone who already has one or more, because they're used to the idea of making changes to accommodate. And the changes they've already made might be useful for the extra need too. Other times though, it's harder than the first one. Because if you have already gone to extensive hassle and expense and changing not just your life but those of the people who need to accommodate you, doing it all over again is just too fracking much.

I don't know if your definition of "body horror" includes the brain. One great fear we all have is losing our memories. Not an amnesia situation (though that could be a horror too), but dementia and similar conditions. We all rely on our memories to get through life but someone of may need them more than others. People who are face blind, for example, have trouble recognizing even people they may know well. If you can no longer count on your memory to figure out who the person is (based on clothing, hair, context, etc), you're in trouble.

A person with an invisible disability may fear exposure. It doesn't have to be about shame. They may fear the social ostracization , the change in how people treat them, losing their job or not being allowed to do parts of it, losing a spouse, or even having their children taken away. Invisible disabilities can become visible if they get worse or if a second disability changes the person's ability to function in a way that doesn't seem "different."

My biggest concerns with showing a character acquiring a disability are:

• That the fear and horror is of becoming disabled. If you show disabled people also going through this horror, that turns this on its head.


• The idea that being disabled means your life is worth less. No more post-accident suicides (my God! really, just no!).


• The idea that people with disabilities are less physically attractive.


• A value judgment on the newly disabled person (lazy, demanding, not important, can't work any more, needs lifelong help, etc...even if some of these things are true, they can still be stereotypes).


• That using adaptive equipment is a sign of "giving up."


• And the worst: inspiration porn. If you just work really hard and want it enough, you'll get better!

To the best of my understanding, the main problem with the zombie genre is that it positions decay-disease-disability as non-human evil to be eradicated, and as a threat to humankind. (I don't necessarily agree with that statement, but that appears to be what the guy in the video you link to is saying.)

If we accept that premise, the way to write more PC body horror would be to break this connection. Some examples of how one can do that:

• Maybe you tell the story from the POV of the zombie. His yesterday friends and family treat him as humans usually treat zombies in the genre, only he isn't in fact a crazy monster hungry for human flesh. (Doesn't have to be specifically zombies. The subject of being unfairly marginalised because of one's disability would be familiar to the group you want to build up.)


• Maybe the story isn't about surviving/defeating the monster, but about finding a cure. Maybe the MC has to observe his own degeneration, or the degeneration of a loved one.


• Maybe what is being inflicted on the victims is not "ugliness", but beauty - some dictator makes everyone look like Holywood actors, against their will.

Those are just off the top of my head, more examples can be found.