A Disability-Led Horror Festival Argues the Monster Should Be Ableism, Not Disability
Access: Horror, which Ariel Baska founded and co-directs, is a disability-led horror and experimental virtual film festival.
Baska and co-director Heather Petrocelli focused the festival on horror on the grounds that ableism and disabled and disfigured bodies have been at the heart of the genre from the beginning. Baska's framing of the project is blunt: the reclaiming is entirely about centering ableism as the horror rather than disability as the horror.
The organisation also does the unglamorous practical work, adding content warnings, captions and audio descriptions while drawing attention to how disability is portrayed on screen.
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The historical half of the argument is the part that sticks: every James Bond villain, every Captain Hook, in Baska's telling, has taught audiences to fear difference. Turn that fear and expectation into the horror rather than the limb difference or the wheelchair, and the monster gets reframed — which Baska calls the most essential thing for the festival.
Calling horror the most honest genre, because it is what we are living through right now, is a large claim to hang a festival on. And the festival's own reason for choosing horror cuts both ways: if disabled and disfigured bodies have been at the heart of the genre from the beginning, horror has been telling the truth about the fear of difference partly by manufacturing it. Reclaiming the monster is a necessary move precisely because the tradition is not innocent.