Twisted bodies, deformed faces, aberrant behavior, and abnormal desires
characterized the hideous creatures of classic Hollywood horror, which
thrilled audiences with their sheer grotesqueness. Most critics have
interpreted these traits as symptoms of sexual repression or as
metaphors for other kinds of marginalized identities, yet Angela M.
Smith conducts a richer investigation into the period's social and
cultural preoccupations. She finds instead a fascination with eugenics
and physical and cognitive debility in the narrative and spectacle of
classic 1930s horror, heightened by the viewer's desire for visions of
vulnerability and transformation.
Reading such films as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Freaks (1932), and Mad Love (1935)
against early-twentieth-century disability discourse and propaganda on
racial and biological purity, Smith showcases classic horror's
dependence on the narratives of eugenics and physiognomics. She also
notes the genre's conflicted and often contradictory visualizations.
Smith ultimately locates an indictment of biological determinism in
filmmakers' visceral treatments, which take the impossibility of racial
improvement and bodily perfection to sensationalistic heights. Playing
up the artifice and conventions of disabled monsters, filmmakers
exploited the fears and yearnings of their audience, accentuating both
the perversity of the medical and scientific gaze and the debilitating
experience of watching horror. Classic horror films therefore encourage
empathy with the disabled monster, offering captive viewers an
unsettling encounter with their own impairment. Smith's work profoundly
advances cinema and disability studies, in addition to general histories
concerning the construction of social and political attitudes toward the
Other.
