Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: The Trope of the Disabled Imposter Child in The Brood, Orphan, and the Works of Ari Aster

INTRODUCTION

Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! My name is Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this is part three of my Monsters of Childhood Innocence series, and part two of my monstrosity, childhood, and disability analysis. There’s just too much to talk about for one video for that one! If you have not watched part one, it’s not required viewing for this video, but I do very much recommend that you check it out for a look into some of the history of important cultural ideas and attitudes towards disability. I’ll provide a quick recap here, too, just to catch us up.

So, if you’re new to the channel, the first thing you need to know is that I’m interested in all of these ideas – childhood, disability, monstrosity, innocence – as social constructs. How is childhood innocence constructed socially? Well, not all cultures in all time periods believed – or believe now – that childhood is synonymous with either ignorance or moral purity, which are two main ingredients of this concept of “innocence.” This idea in the Western world developed in the eighteenth century, influenced significantly by the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and they continued to develop throughout the Romantic era. These ideas have proved to have a lot of cultural staying power, so Western cultures still have a strong connection to this definition of childhood. For a version of that history that takes more than like three sentences, check out my first video in the childhood innocence series, where I also talk about how this concept has historically been intertwined with white supremacy. Because that’s the other thing about unpacking childhood innocence: for as lovely as this belief may sound, there are actually a lot hidden assumptions and biases baked into the idea that can actually negatively impact real kids’ lives.

For instance! Cultural ideas about childhood and disability are extremely tangled up together, and historically, this has not been for the better. Both children and disabled people are frequently seen as less complete, less whole, less entirely human than able-bodied adults. With able-bodied children, however, this deficit is seen as temporary. It is the responsibility of adult society, in the proper cultural institutions such as the family or the school, to mold the child as they move from that sweet blissful ignorance of “innocence” into whatever version of adulthood that society sees as ideal. For example, the productive, contributing American citizen. A lot of our cultural preoccupation with “innocence” is the fear of corrupting children, not only because of our desire to preserve this Romanticized state of natural goodness (though it’s also that), but also because we fear that corruption leading children off of this path towards the kind of adult they are “supposed to” become. An innocent child is the promise of a future good adult. The child isn’t “finished” yet, so currently they’re an investment.

Disability throws a wrench into that formula, especially in a culture as individualistic as, again for example, modern America. That ideal adult is collectively imagined as self-sufficient, independent, capable of growing the economy. (How they’re meant to do that is also highly gendered, but that’s the subject of a future video!) There are many disabilities that reveal the illusion of self-sufficiency and independence. No one can fully embody these things – you can be as much of a self-starter as you like, but you probably didn’t pave the roads you take to work, right? So everyone is interdependent, but we like to pretend otherwise. And disability frequently makes the impossibility of “independence” particularly obvious. Generally, societies writ large don’t love it when the flaws of their social constructs are pointed out. After all, social constructs are ideas and ideologies that are created collectively within a culture to organize the way we live. I mean, that’s a super brief and simplified definition there. But because of that, they’re supposed to remain mostly invisible. You’re not supposed to poke holes in your culture’s overarching ideas about reality; you’re just supposed to live them out. And when that can’t happen – well, that’s often where monster stories come in.

Last video, I talked about how the disabled child’s “innocence” is imagined differently from the able-bodied child’s “innocence,” in that the latter is granted that path towards the future, but the former is not. We can see that in eugenicist “monster stories” like the 1917 film The Black Stork, in which the disabled child is sweet and innocent and belongs to Jesus – extremely literally, because he has to die and go to heaven. Otherwise, he will shed that innocence and become a monstrous blight upon society. The able-bodied child’s deficit – that not-yet-full-humanness, that less-than status as compared to adults – will eventually go away, but the disabled child’s deficit never will. As cultural narratives go, this is obviously a really harmful one that has clear and obvious negative effects on real people’s lives – such as kids not getting life-saving vaccines for fear of disabilities (that those vaccines don’t even cause). But would you believe that these monster stories about disability can get even more extreme?

That’s right. In this video, we are going to talk all about the trope of the inherently evil disabled child. So strap in!

EVIL ORIGINS: THE BROOD

The Brood is a 1979 film written and directed by David Cronenberg, who is often held up as the auteur of body horror. Now, obviously your girl is a horror fan – I run a monster commentary YouTube channel – but I’ll be real with you: body horror is not typically my go-to, and a lot of the reason for that is the subgenre’s let’s say uneasy relationship to disability. I’m not saying all body horror is inherently ableist! Don’t at me. And I do think that body horror makes sense as a subgenre of horror, because we humans are mortal beings, and we don’t like that, so if we’re going to be exploring our fears through narrative, then stories about the dissolution and destruction of the body are obviously going to be a part of that body of work. And when body horror addresses the literal meat of mortality, I think it can be extremely effective. If there are any Dropout fans among my viewers, I just started watching Burrow’s End, which is a D&D actual play series in which the player characters are all stoats. Sounds cute, no? Well, the very first battle takes place within the actively deteriorating body of a bear that has been hijacked by parasitic chipmunks. There’s a whole set piece that they have with removable organs, and it is very distressing and very rad. However, when constructing a body horror narrative, it is easy to portray those fears of the dissolution of the body by relying on images of bodily differences that some actual real people may live with while still being very much alive. So all that to say, I am sort of predisposed to be a bit wary when presented with body horror, and with The Brood, you will see an example of why.

In The Brood, our main character Frank is going through it. He has primary custody of his young daughter, Candice, while his wife Nola is going through in-patient psychiatric treatment from a controversial specialist, Dr. Hal Raglan. Raglan practices a technique called “psychoplasmics,” in which he helps patients manifest their repressed psychological issues through their bodies for … reasons? I guess to get them to like get it out, as it were. But like, the opening scene is Raglan roleplaying this guy’s overbearing father until the patient erupts in sores all over his body, and I’m going to be real, I don’t really see the therapeutic value in that so much. Frank agrees with me. He is highly skeptical of Raglan’s treatments, especially when Candice returns home from a visit to her mother with scratches and what looks like a bite mark on her back. Frank understandably wants to stop the visits, but he is advised that if he breaks the custody agreement without proof of wrongdoing, the court could award Candice to Nola entirely. So he sets out trying to gather evidence against Raglan’s practices, while Raglan’s therapies for Nola intensify.

These “therapies” soon break containment. After a session in which Nola rails against the abuses she endured growing up with her mother Juliana, Candice is left with said subpar caretaker as a babysitter. Juliana hears strange noises from the kitchen, and when she investigates, she sees that someone has smashed all her stuff. As she stands there dumbfounded, she is attacked by a small child-like figure with atypical features and hands. She is violently bludgeoned to death, though Candice is unharmed (physically, anyway). The murders don’t stop there. Nola’s father meets the same fate, as does Candice’s teacher, with whom Nola suspects Frank is having an affair. In the latter case, several of these small people infiltrate Candice’s kindergarten class by blending in with the other students bundled into their winter coats. It is only when the teacher sees their faces that she knows something is wrong.

Frank manages to kill one of these tiny assailants that was still hiding in his mother-in-law’s house when he goes back after Juliana’s death. The body is autopsied, and the coroner delivers his findings with breathless excitement and fascination. The child – and it is a child – has a cleft lip, no teeth, and a malformed tongue, and is therefore incapable of speech. The child also has malformed eyes, no sex organs, and no navel – so its gestation and birth were clearly irregular. Strangest of all, it appears to have a sort of nutrient sac of some sort from which it was drawing strength, as opposed to eating and growing as a typical child would. The coroner is practically giddy over these irregularities, while Frank is deeply disturbed. Ultimately, though, his mission remains unchanged: protect Candice.

After the attack on Candice’s teacher, two of the strange children take her away, back to Nola. Frank heads out to where Raglan is keeping her as his last remaining “patient”; he has jettisoned the rest of his experiments and is focusing his attention entirely on her now. Once there, Raglan has a startling revelation for Frank: the strange children are products of Nola’s rage, and they are psychically connected to her. Extremely belatedly, Raglan has come to the conclusion that producing this outcome through psychoplasmics was a bad idea, as the children become murderous at the slightest anger from their source. He offers to go extricate Candice from the attic bedroom in which they all sleep in their weird matching clothes, but he tells Frank that he must keep Nola calm and happy while he does so, or the children will attack. Frank tries to get Nola to believe that he wants her back, but she isn’t really buying it. She challenges him to behold what has become of her, and she opens her dress to reveal an external womb hanging from her torso, pulsing with new life. She bites open the membrane, letting loose just truly so much blood, and then she takes out an infant version of the strange children and begins to lick it clean. Cronenberg! You may have noticed I have stopped providing visual aids at this part of the summary. I’m not sure YouTube really wants me to provide those, so you can either use your imagination or look it up at your own discretion. Frank is not quite able to keep the disgust off of his face, so the Brood in the chamber above begin to attack before Raglan and Candice make it out. Raglan is able to push Candice to relative safety, but then he is overcome. Frank then strangles Nola to death, which, let’s be real, he’s been itching to do since the beginning, and Nola weirdly eggs him on as he goes. As soon as she succumbs, all of the Brood drop dead, as they relied on her for psychic energy. Frank escapes with a now deeply traumatized Candice, and as they drive away, the camera zooms in on Candice’s arm, where two small polyps have begun to form: a physical manifestation of her psychiatric state, just as her mother experienced. Dun dun dun.

All right! So, unsurprisingly, The Brood is a movie that has generated quite a bit of discussion about misogyny. Feminist film critic Carrie Rickey points out that, if we’re looking to blame someone for the generation of the titular Brood, it’s really more Raglan’s fault than Nola’s. He’s the one manipulating her mind and body, and she is in many ways also a victim. While that’s true, the film still portrays the reproductive female body as a literal horror show, capable of generating monsters if its full power is unleashed. So, while Raglan is ultimately like the worse bad guy here, I still think we’re pretty deep in the mire of misogyny all the same. However, that’s not what this video is about. I want to unpack what’s going on with those kids.

Throughout the movie, the Brood are contrasted with Candice, who is set up as the pinnacle of the “innocent child.” Here, her innocence is highlighted by her vulnerability, and vice versa. She’s got beautiful blonde hair – markers of whiteness are frequently visual symbols of innocence. Take a look at my first video in this series for more info on that. Candice’s literal nickname is Candy, tying sweetness into her entire identity. She is blameless, helpless, defenseless, very feminine. And it is the literal custody, the control, of her body that is the central conflict of the film.

Then we have the Brood. They’re blond, too, though their only parent isn’t, which is kind of interesting. But I think the visual similarities they share with Candy – hair, clothes – are meant to highlight the depth of the more stark difference between them. Several of the Brood’s disabilities clearly indicate a lack of futurity: not only do they lack the body parts to produce offspring, they also cannot speak and therefore they can’t produce knowledge through language. With no forward direction for their life course, they are devoid of the “innocence” associated with the beginning of that life. Remember, childhood innocence is supposed to be a guarantor of a future good adult. The Brood have none of that. They’re just grotesque embodied rage. The title of the film points at their distance from anything human: they are offspring, but they are not children.

In her book Disability, Literature, Genre, Ria Cheyne writes, “In horror, disabled characters are frequently monstrous perpetrators of evil acts or vulnerable victims or potential victims” (27-28). The Brood clearly fall into the first category. This is both interesting and troubling when we consider, as Cheyne does, what the point of horror is. Horror is supposed to make you feel, in a very literal, physical sense of that word. It is, as Cheyne calls it, a “body genre” (29). When horror is successful, we as audience members experience its effects in the flipping of our stomachs, the tightness of our muscles, the heat of adrenaline in our veins. Body horror in a body genre, then, is supposed to conjure the imagined pain of what it would feel like for our bodies to go so wrong. Therefore, Cheyne explains, “Disability’s entrenched associations with both fear and vulnerability have attained it a central, though rarely acknowledged, position in the horror tradition” (29).

Cheyne also points out that, despite their interconnectedness, horror scholars and disability scholars have historically been a bit hesitant to go near each other’s subjects. She notes that horror scholars generally discuss movie monsters as metaphors, symbols for something other than what they are – and, yeah, guilty. I do that all the time. But the Brood are not just symbolic of, for example, misogyny – they are also literally depicted as disabled people. Minus the missing navel and the nutrient sac, their disabilities are things that real people share. Real people can be nonverbal, for any variety of reasons. Real people can have visual impairments. Real people have facial differences.

It is the Brood’s disabilities ultimately that mark them as different from Candice. Though they share a mother, and though the Brood are all younger than Candice, they are not real children, not altogether human – just look at their inhuman bodies for proof – and therefore they are incapable of innocence. And the dread of that ending hinges on the physical transformation of Candice’s body: the deviation from her previously pure childhood state via trauma – via the destruction of her innocence – that ensures a future of embodied difference that can lead only to pain and probably evildoing, like the malformed Brood and like her transmogrified mother Nola.

And that doesn’t even touch all the ideas about psychiatric disabilities in this movie! In “Viewing Popular Films about Mental Illness through a Sociological Lens,” Kathy Livingston explains that “Negative images of people with mental illness (PWMI) in visual media such as television and film are ubiquitous” (119). Not only do we have plenty of homicidal maniacs in media, but we also, Livingston points out, have PWMI portrayed as “childlike, irresponsible, incompetent, unpredictable, dangerous, and unstable” (119). Childlike, but without the innocence. Without the futurity. The disabled Brood are literally manifestations of Nola’s mental illness, which makes them ontologically violent. It is a relief to the audience when she, and they, die.

Now, I wish I could say that this kind of treatment of disability in horror stayed in the ’70s, but unfortunately, I cannot. So now let’s move our conversation into the 21st century to talk about how the trope of the evil disabled imposter child continues to thrive.

WHO’S IN THE BODY? THE DISABLED IMPOSTER CHILD IN ORPHAN AND HEREDITARY

If you already know the twist to the 2009 film Orphan – and there will be spoilers from here on out – then you’re probably thinking, you’re cheating, Kathleen. The villain of Orphan isn’t a disabled child. No, I know. That’s what we’re going to talk about.

Orphan opens with a dream sequence – or, more accurately, a nightmare. Kate is reliving her traumatic birth experience of her third child, Jessica, who was stillborn. She is understandably still working through her grief for that loss, but she has decided that she and her husband are ready to welcome another child into their life, in the form of an older adopted kid. Sidebar – this is the third video where I’ve talked about a story where evil enters a family via adoption, and I have not made that many videos yet. We pretty badly need to retire this trope! Anyway, Kate says that she wants to “take the love that I had for Jessica and I want to give it to someone who really needs it.” I don’t know to what extent the film wants the audience to be worried about that statement at all or if we’re just meant to uncritically aww at the sentiment, but perhaps that could make for a bit of intense pressure on this kid you haven’t met yet? Obviously, if you’re going to adopt a child, you should love that child. But baby Jessica, who died before she even got a chance to do anything wrong, is the absolute pinnacle of innocent childhood. She’s literally symbolized by white roses that Kate grows in her honor. She is purity unfettered by the realities of life. So perhaps Kate should kind of disentangle her grief from this one child from her expectations for another child a little bit more before moving forward with this adoption. But whatever, it doesn’t matter anyway, because the “kid” she winds up with is Esther.

Kate and her husband John acquire Esther at a Catholic orphanage of the kind that doesn’t enormously exist anymore, at least in the US. Group homes do exist for older kids in foster care, yes, but this whole model of just like showing up and picking one out is decidedly old-timey. Then again, Esther is an old-timey sort herself, given to wearing sweet ruffly dresses and ribbons around her neck and wrists. She has quaintly Victorian hobbies, like painting and, we later learn, classical piano. She charms John right away, and Kate is also impressed by her polite, articulate speech that bears just a trace of an accent from her native Russia. The head nun speaks highly of Esther, though she notes that the only thing that seems to upset her is if anyone tries to take away her ribbons. Classic spooky story concern.

John and Kate take Esther, who is nine, home to their other two children: Danny, a boy around her age, and the younger sister Max, who is Deaf. Esther bonds with Max right away, though Danny resents the attention she takes up, and the way other kids at school make fun of her (and by proxy him) for her old-fashioned style of dressing and speaking. Kate and John have some good moments with their new daughter at first, but eventually things start to turn, especially with Kate. Esther walks in on her new parents having sex in the kitchen, which is not really the move I’d make in an open concept house with three kids, but hey. When Kate tries to address what Esther saw, Esther displays a knowledge of sex that Kate finds startlingly un-innocent. Kate is now concerned about Esther’s influence over Max, but John dismisses her. He also believes Esther when she says the schoolyard bully fell from the playground equipment, though the bully insists Esther pushed her. (Which she did. We as the audience are never left in any doubt about Esther’s evil.) Kate grows more and more suspicious of Esther’s deceptions and moments of knowingness, and she starts looking into Esther’s origins from before she arrived at the orphanage. She knows that Esther had been adopted from Russia by an American family who had then tragically died in a house fire, returning her to her orphan status.

I think you can imagine what actually went on there.

Kate’s fears of Esther endangering Max are founded, as Esther recruits Max to help “scare” the head nun when she comes over to share concerns about the missing pieces of Esther’s background from before her original placement. Esther just fully pushes Max in front of the nun’s car. Luckily the nun avoids hitting Max, but when she gets out to see if Max is all right, Esther bludgeons her with a hammer and then makes Max help her hide the body. Danny, who was right about Esther all along, catches a glimpse of the criminal goings-on, and Esther tries to threaten him into silence. Meanwhile, Esther has set her sights on wooing John – and getting rid of Kate, mostly by driving her insane. She cuts all of the white roses from Jessica’s memorial bush, which Kate sees as a deliberate attack, but John interprets as an innocent mistake. He grows increasingly suspicious of his wife’s mental state, and he believes that he needs to protect all the kids – especially Esther – from Kate.

Things continue to escalate, as Esther breaks her own arm to frame Kate for abuse, lets the parking brake go while Max is in the car to frame Kate for neglect, and then just straight up tries to murder Danny. Though Esther succeeds in making Kate look crazy, she pushes her luck too far, as Max turns against her, and then finally so does John when she attempts to seduce him. At this point, Kate’s investigations finally pay off as she gets word that Esther is not actually Esther. She is an Estonian woman named Leena who was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital for, just like, violent insanity, I guess? Her ribbons cover scars from the straitjacket. Also, she has proportionate dwarfism, which is why she looks nine. This revelation plays over Esther unbinding her chest, removing her false child teeth, and removing the makeup that somehow made her look like a kid, revealing that agéd thirty-something skin beneath.

More stuff happens, Esther kills John, Kate kills Esther, Kate and the two real kids survive, yay, the end. So Orphan is not something I would consider a good film. It does occur to me, between this and The Brood, I am kind of talking about movies I dislike a bit more than usual today. There really is just something so tiresome about the evil disabled person trope. It’s so fundamentally lazy. Also, it’s very easy to pick apart. I mean, at least The Brood has the excuse of being sci-fi, but Orphan is ostensibly just a psychological thriller in which everything that happens is theoretically plausible in reality. But, like, no it isn’t.

Let’s look at the treatment of psychiatric illness first. Esther/Leena is supposed to be so violently insane that she had to be kept in a straitjacket, but she’s also totally capable of calmly biding her time in an orphanage until she can charm a random family into taking her in? She serially murders families when the dads inevitably reject her – because she has chosen to present herself as nine – but meanwhile, she’s content to just chill and wait for indeterminate periods of time until the American adoption system continues to work out in her favor? Now, I’m no psychiatrist, but I don’t think you’ll be able to match this pathology to anything in the DSM-V. This is not a real pattern of symptoms that anyone would experience. This is just the dangerous crazy person trope through and through.

In the introduction to the book “And Then the Monsters Come Out”: Madness, Language and Power, Fiona Ann Papps writes, “Within the disciplines of literary studies, cultural studies, religious studies and anthropology, madness is more likely to be spoken about with reference to tropes, rather than reference to intra- and interpsychic phenomena. As alluded to by the title of both this volume and its introduction, a trope commonly used in reference to madness is that of the monstrous” (ix). In other words, a lot of cultural storytelling about “madness,” and therefore the discourses within the scholarly fields that study such things, are not super interested in the realities of psychological illness. Instead, these narratives focus on what “insane people” mean to “sane people,” and that meaning is often interpreted as violent threat. But the great majority of people with mental illnesses do not actually commit violence, and those who do are frequently enmeshed in economically unstable and unsafe environments. To quote Dr. Paul Appelbaum, “a great deal of what is responsible for violence among people with mental illness may be the same factors that are responsible for violence among people without mental illness.” Unfortunately, stories about the monstrous mad person tend not to care about this evidence-based research.

Then there’s the whole imposter child thing. Okay. So adults with proportional dwarfism generally can’t actually pass as nine. But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Orphan was, sort of, inspired by a true story of a grown woman posing as a child – Barbora Škrlová, who posed as both a 13-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy, in both the Czech Republic and Norway. I kind of struck out looking for reliable detailed information on this case. There are a lot of true crime podcasts on the subject, but I tend to have a hard time entirely trusting those. But it appears that the first case of assumed identity, in which Škrlová posed as an adopted child and was involved in the abuse of her new siblings, may have been tied to some cult involvement with multiple adults in the situation, and Škrlová may have been the cult leader. And then it looks like there was definitely also collusion with the “parents” when she was posing as a boy in Norway. So while she did fool multiple authority figures for a time, her relationships with the families that she enmeshed herself in seems to have been a lot more complicated than just posing as their kid. Also, I saw her height listed as 5’2” in one admittedly somewhat source, which is … not even that short? Like I know they grow ’em tall in Scandinavia, but still. Another (also potentially dubious) source said she had a glandular disorder that accounted for her youthful appearance. There is a book about the case in the Czech Republic, but I wasn’t able to get my hands on it, so if anyone knows more facts about this situation than I do, you can let me know in the comments. But suffice it to say: Orphan simplified things from this inspiration material a lot, and in highly revealing ways.

First off, the film chose to exaggerate its villain’s disabilities, both psychological and physical. Whatever else Škrlová had going on medically, she was not as small as Esther, and therefore had to set her fraudulent sights on posing as young teenagers as opposed to elementary schoolers. While both the true and the fictional situations are wild, there is a significant difference between an adolescent and a prepubescent child in terms of how they are culturally constructed re: innocence. Adolescence is constructed as a time of transition, and therefore a period that attracts a lot of anxiety around losing innocence. This is where we see if that move from a good child to a good adult is going to stay on the rails, as it were. But nine is still clearly in the prepubescent stage of “innocence,” as emphasized by Esther’s clothing, and by the shock the audience is meant to feel at her sexual knowledge. So the filmmakers chose to exaggerate Esther’s physical difference – make her smaller than her real-life counterpart – to also exaggerate the distance between the evil imposter and the innocent childhood that she deceptively embodies. And while Škrlová did apparently (unsuccessfully) claim mental illness in her defense at her trial, she did not, as far as I can tell, have an extensive backstory of being confined in a straitjacket in an asylum. Essentially, the makers of Orphan saw a wild true story of crime and violence, and decided that the best way to bring this to audiences was to get rid of all its complexity and streamline it into well-worn tropes of the disabled monster.

Unfortunately, the ties between this film and real life do not end there. Some viewers may be familiar with the story of Natalia Grace. Natalia does, in fact, have dwarfism, and she was adopted from Ukraine by multiple American families. The first time, she was adopted at age four and given up again two years later, with the adoptive family citing “disruptive behaviors.” The second family adopted her shortly thereafter. Two years after that is when the whole issue of age came into legal question. Her adoptive parents petitioned the court to change her birth certificate to say that she was not eight but twenty-two. Now that Natalia was legally an adult, the family could move her out and move away.

Slight problem: Natalia was not in any way twenty-two. Much later, as an actual young adult, Natalia would have her DNA tested to confirm that she was the age she said she was all along, so her adoptive family very much did abandon her as an elementary-school-aged child. Her adoptive mother literally referenced the movie Orphan when falsely accusing Natalia of being an imposter adult. Usually, when I say that the narratives we tell about childhood affect real children, I don’t mean it in quite such a literal, one-to-one way.

But between The Brood and Orphan, we can see this trope of the disabled child as a fake child. The Brood, without navels to mark a natural birth and without genitalia to mark a reproductive future, are suspended in time, not full of promise for what they can become and not full of innocence for what they are now. They infiltrate the school as children, but they are not real. Esther, as an adult, must have been a child at some point, but whatever her childhood was like is completely absent from the film. Her “madness” is entirely adult, and she uses her disability to mimic childhood like the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. Her association with childhood is predatory and dangerous.

I do think it’s interesting that she is portrayed as such a threat to Max, the Deaf child. Max is a disabled child who is both real and innocent. I try not to be too cynical, but I can’t entirely shake the suspicion that this disability may have been included in the film partially to shield against accusations of ableism – like, look, we can’t be ableist, we have a good disabled character alongside the villainous disabled character! I’m not saying that the thought process would have been that deliberate or on-the-surface, but I can’t help suspecting that it may have come into play. It’s also worth noting that Max’s disability does not include visual markers of difference, except for an unobtrusive hearing aid. In the horror genre that relies so heavily on what looks scary, that is significant. I don’t want to downplay the ways in which Max’s Deafness is handled somewhat well in the film; there aren’t a lot of roles for Deaf actors (and the kid who played her, Aryana Engineer, is actually Deaf), and even fewer where the character’s Deafness isn’t the sum total of the role. Max is a brave kid who finds ways of fighting back against Esther’s influence in ways that are not defined by her Deafness. However, one of the ways that Esther inserts herself as a wedge between Max and Danny is by quickly becoming better at sign language than Danny is, and I think there’s something messy and weird about that when you consider Esther as the disabled imposter using another character’s disability to manipulate her situation. I don’t know! This aspect of the film does make it a little more complicated, more difficult to read, but the narrative itself, in my opinion, remains pretty mired in adultist ableism, despite the presence of a good disabled child. Max is great, but her inclusion in the narrative doesn’t erase the story’s reliance on the idea that some disabilities – both psychiatric and physical – are incompatible with innocence and therefore with childhood, and actually pose a threat to real children. And again, we can see how these ideas play out in real life with real kids like Natalia Grace who have experienced trauma and therefore may not “act innocent,” and whose physical disabilities make them doubly at risk to adult rejection.

So where do we stand with these tropes in horror in more recent years? Still pretty uneasily. A good case in point would be the work of Ari Aster. Take the 2018 movie Hereditary. In this film, a family is not okay. That could kind of be the entire synopsis, but I’ll be a little more detailed. The Graham family consists of mom Annie, played by my queen Toni Collette, dad Steve, teen son Peter, and tween daughter Charlie, played by Milly Shapiro. Annie’s mother Ellen has just died, which has thrown the family into a very weird grief. Ellen was a strange person with a strained relationship with Annie, but she was always very close with Charlie. Charlie is also a strange person. She is very quiet and does not react to people or situations in expected ways. She’s also got a real Chekhov’s gun of a peanut allergy.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow of the plot, because if you haven’t seen Hereditary and you enjoy horror, I do recommend that you watch it for yourself. When I saw it in theaters, I leaned over to my friend halfway through and whispered, “This movie keeps not doing what I think it’s going to do, and it’s stressing me out.” In terms of a portrait of a family falling apart under the weight of its own secrets, resentments, and repressed emotions, it is incredibly tense and scary. Alex Wolff as Peter does an incredible job of portraying shock and panic, and of course Toni Collette is perfect and brilliant and very unhinged. I am, however, going to spoil most of the very ending, so if you want to skip to the conclusion instead of hearing that, you can. Honestly, though, the ending is not the strongest part of the film, in my opinion, and I don’t think knowing it would take away from the experience of the much more tense second act.

So here it is: turns out, Ellen was a demonic cultist who had ushered in the incarnation of the demon Paimon into Charlie. That was sort of a bummer for the cult, because they had wanted a male host for the demon; eventually, through a series of events that I won’t entirely give away, Paimon does end up in Peter instead. However, Paimon’s embodiment of Charlie accounted for her behavioral strangeness and general “creepiness.” And look, I’ve talked before about how there’s a long line of creepy kids in horror movies. It’s that juxtaposition between what we think should be innocent and then what is not that makes the creepy horror kid so creepy. But as Karen J. Renner points out in Evil Children in the Popular Imagination, most of these portrayals still fundamentally protect our collective belief in childhood innocence, because there’s always some reason that the evil child is not actually a child. With the Brood, they are not biologically correct children; they are manifestations of adult female rage. With Orphan, Esther’s literally an adult. And with Hereditary, Charlie has a child’s body, but it is host for a demon. On a higher level, all three of these films are about the breakdown of the nuclear family, a favorite topic of horror movies with creepy kids. Renner points out that this is also a way of locating the source of fear and horror outside of the category of childhood. Childhood itself gets to remain a pure if vulnerable space, and if it is not properly cared for within the confines of a good family, then a child can become corrupted enough that they literally can no longer be part of the category of childhood anymore. They don’t count as a real kid. But the problem is still with adult society and not childhood itself.

So, okay, Hereditary isn’t breaking any new ground there. So I just sort of read the film as a solid iteration of that treatment of childhood in horror that didn’t quite stick its landing until I discussed the movie with my now fiancée, who said, “I don’t like how they treated the girl’s face.” Milly Shapiro, who plays Charlie, has cleidocranial dysplasia, a diagnosis that became more known in the zeitgeist through Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin in Stranger Things. This diagnosis affects the bones of the face, including teeth, and the collarbones, which are sometimes completely absent. As such, people with this diagnosis exhibit some facial difference, to varying degrees. My partner’s criticism was that she felt Hereditary used the actor’s facial difference as a shorthand for Charlie’s creepiness, as a sign of her being an imposter.

I’ll be real with you, I was reluctant to agree with that criticism, because I mostly liked the movie and didn’t want a movie that I mostly liked to be ableist. Plus, I argued, Milly Shapiro was already an established theater actor before being cast. Possibly her cleidocranial dysplasia had nothing to do with her getting the role and she’s just a good actor who nailed her audition. And she is a good actor, and I’m sure she did nail the audition.

But then I saw Ari Aster’s Midsommar.

I didn’t see this one in theaters when it came out in 2019, only a year after Hereditary, but I watched it with my partner a few years later, after she’d already shared her misgivings about Hereditary with me. This movie is also about grief and the breakdown of a relationship and cult stuff, because Aster has his themes that he enjoys, as is fair. However, in this film, we’re not dealing with childhood that much. Instead, we have a fracturing romantic relationship against the backdrop of a Scandinavian death cult. All good so far.

But then we meet Ruben, a child who is seen as some kind of oracle for the group, but who is literally so insignificant to the plot that he does not make the Wikipedia summary. He is a kid with a very prominent facial difference, and his disabilities are implied to be the result of inbreeding. This character is not played by a child with actual facial difference. His appearance is instead the product of prosthetics and makeup. He is fully just there to be creepy, and to signify how messed up and bad the cult is.

“Damn it,” I said when we got to this part of this film. “You were right. Aster is weird about faces.”

So once again, we arrive back at the disabled child’s body as a symbol of fear, of corruption, of violence, of a society that cannot hold. Once again, the disabled child’s body is not a site of real childhood, of innocent childhood, but of madness and the ruined potential of a better future. And once again, audiences are meant to recoil in terror at this imposter, this poor facsimile of the precious things that we hold dear. So like, have we really not come very far at all from Ambroise Paré identifying kids with congenital disabilities as “monsters and marvels” in Early Modern France? Have we not moved past the eugenicist rhetoric of The Black Stork, which declares “as its babies, so is the nation” as it advocates for the elimination of disabled children before they can turn into – the horror – disabled adults? The plot and themes of Midsommar would be entirely unchanged if Ruben were cut from the film entirely, but Aster just had to rely on this cinematic shorthand to drive home the spookiness of his death cult. I really think he could have trusted us as audience members to find it spooky without Ruben. But this just goes to show how ingrained the disabled child imposter is in our collective monster metaphors, our collective horror storytelling. And while I pray we don’t wind up with future cases as blatantly ripped from these narratives as the abuse and abandonment of Natalia Grace, real kids are clearly still dealing with the fallout of these ableist attitudes.

CONCLUSION: UGH, IT’S RFK JR. AGAIN

I closed out last video with a discussion of RFK, Jr.’s “soft eugenics,” in which he and people ideologically aligned with him are not advocating for directly killing disabled people, but their anti-vaccine, anti-medicine stances are predicated on the idea that healthy people can survive anything thrown at them – and the implication that the unhealthy cannot, and that might not be a bad thing. Survival of the fittest. Well, Bobby has been running his mouth all around town proving my point. To wit, a day before that last video even went up, our Secretary of – and I cannot stress this enough – Health and Human Services, said, “I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation—you can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection. And I know that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”

Fun fact: “mitochondrial challenges” are not a thing that one can diagnose by looking at a person’s face. Scientifically, Kennedy’s statements are just Grade-A nonsense. But read in light of the monster stories we’ve just analyzed, we can see the cultural tropes and stereotypes that he is pulling from. Shambling disabled children – imposter children, identified as such because they are not what children are “supposed to look” like. Strange body movements, uncanny faces, just like the Brood or Charlie. Lack of social connection, also like those two, and also like Esther – and also because Bob can’t go two seconds without implying that autism is the scariest monster of them all. Faulty bodies, faulty minds, no futures, broken, missing, fake childhood.

If I sound exhausted, it’s because I am. I love a monster story, obviously, but when you study them, and when you study childhood, it really can mess you up to constantly notice how easy it is to scare people by telling them the kids are not all right – that the kids are at risk of falling away from that idyllic, idealized state of natural childhood innocence and into something wrong and monstrous. You can convince people of so much bad stuff by using that very simple, old, boring story.

But we all have choices in how we approach the things that scare us. We are enmeshed in our cultural narratives, but we do have the power to decide how to read them. One of the subgenres of horror that I find hardest to watch because of how bad it scares me is medical horror. Any situation in which a character is incapacitated by some medical means – sedated, immobilized, held hostage by their injuries or illness and then abused by a caretaker – truly makes me feel like I’m crawling out of my skin. I tend to avoid stories that feature this as their primary plot, but I run into it sometimes as a subplot. Two examples that stand out in my mind are an episode of the (generally very fun) Paramount+ show Evil, in which one of the main characters was held captive in a hospital by demonically inclined (and racist) nurses, and one of the storylines of Mike Flanagan’s take on The Fall of the House of Usher, in which a woman suffers extensive burns and then is kept uncared for and immobilized by her vengeful husband. I was viscerally upset by both of these stories, not for any personal reasons. I’ve never experienced that level of powerlessness, so it’s not like triggering any trauma in me. It’s just purely such a scary idea.

Now, medical horror can definitely have ableism within it. Fears of paralysis, of insanity, of bodily disintegration within a medical setting – a lot of that comes down to many of the fears of disability that we’ve been discussing. And I could easily take the fear that those narratives give me and let that drive me into the anti-medical stance of an RFK, Jr. I could go totally individualist and not let anyone do anything to my body, or put anything into my body like a vaccine, even if it would keep other people safe. Or I could think about how it is only an ableist society that allows people to fall through the cracks and into the hands of bad actors in the first place. In a world where we listen to people with disabilities, value their voices and participation, make their surroundings as accessible as possible, it’s a lot harder to hide someone away in a home or hospital room without anyone noticing and checking in. I could realize that it is not just the destruction of the body that scares me, but the lack of power to make my own choices about what I can do with my body and mind. And I can use my fear at stories about that powerlessness to find ways to point out, and hopefully help dismantle, the systems that keep certain people – children, people with disabilities, especially children with disabilities – trapped in those imposed states of powerlessness.

We have simply got to move past this fear of other people’s bodies, and this fear that our children won’t be as pure and perfect as we’ve convinced ourselves they’re supposed to be. It’s old, it’s tired, it’s not good storytelling, and it hurts real kids. And if we really want to spook ourselves with some monster stories, there’s scarier stuff out there! In our government! Right now! We are creatures of narrative and metaphor; our monsters help us understand the world that we navigate. But we have the ability and the responsibility to tell stories that accurately reflect the world we live in, and don’t just uphold the fantasies and prejudices of the world the most powerful among us have made up – a world that has never really existed.

If you know of any monster stories that actually do something unique and interesting and not completely harmful with disability and childhood, I would love for you to tell me about it in the comments. I would also love to hear about other stories that my analysis of The Brood, Orphan, and the works of Ari Aster made you think about. Where do you see these tropes we’ve been discussing popping up? So this marks the end of my two-parter on this subject, but I have a strong feeling that I’ll be returning to many of these ideas again in future videos. I hope that you enjoyed this one, and if you did, please give the video a like – it really genuinely helps me bring these topics to more and more people. Thank you for watching, and remember to subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss out on the next in my series about the monsters of childhood innocence. And with that, I hope to see you back here in two weeks on The Monster & The Child for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

  • The Brood, dir. David Cronenberg (1979)
  • Orphan, dir. Jaume Collet-Serra (2009)
  • Hereditary, dir. Ari Aster (2018)
  • Midsommar, dir. Ari Aster (2019)
  • The Black Stork, dir. Theodore and Leopold Wharton (1917)

References:

kathleenmkellett

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