MCDANIEL 423

You can point a finger at a zombie.

Sometimes they fall off.:
Contemporary Zombie Films,
Embedded Ableism, and Disability as

JAMIE McDANIEL

Disability and/as Horror

At first glance, contemporary zombie culture appears

to participate regularly in the horror genres tradition of
reinforcing a cultural association between disability and
deviance. Indeed, these types of images are flourishing, as we
are experiencing a zombie renaissance of sorts in literature and
comics, in film and television, and in other aspects of society,
such as politics. Many characters in these zombie and other
horror films from Franklin, the character in a wheelchair in
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), to Freddy Krueger of
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) seem to fall within what
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called narrative
prosthesis. The concept of narrative prosthesis suggests that
literature and film have historically and frequently depended
on disability for two purposes: as a routine characterization
tool or as an opportunistic metaphorical device (47).
Mitchell and Snyder argue that authors and filmmakers
have proliferated disabled characters in literature and film
due to this reliance, which contrasts with the racial, ethnic,
and gender identities that literary and cinematic history have
traditionally marginalized through absence. In other words,
disability demands a narrative. If a body does not conform to
established definitions of normal or average, we want to
know how and why.
This abundance of disabled characters and our need for
narrative fulfillment or closure consequently has produced a
424 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

num ber of common tropes. One common to the horror genre

is that of the physically mutilated monster. The revelation of
A Nightmare on Elm Streets burned and scarred child killer
Freddy Krueger forces the audience to associate his deformity
with dangerous and deviant behavior. In this example, Freddys
scars conveniently characterize him as evil, serve as plot device
to propel the narrative forward toward an explanation for
those scars, and act as a metaphor for the scarring effects
of childhood fears or, as in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2:
Freddys Revenge (1985), closet homosexuality. As Brandy
Schillace argues, literature and film often depict characters
with a disability as morally superior to abled characters, as
well as ethically purifieda second common trope in horror
(588). The Texas Chain Saw Massacres Franklin, who uses
a wheelchair and acts as a Cassandra-like guide, conforms
to this second trope; his friends disregard Franklins doubts
about their actions, ultimately to their doom. In each of these
instances, the use of narrative prosthesis shows how these two
disabled characters, as Michael Davidson explains, serve as a
crutch to shore up normalcy (176). After the audience comes
to agree with Franklins accurate misgivings, Leatherface kills
him, which allows Franklins sister Sally to escape. The film
leads viewers to mourn the death of a man whose disability,
the film suggests, leaves him defenseless. Similarly, in the
films final act, viewers applaud when Sally escapes, an act that
restores orderthe normal state of thingsto the world.
In other words, both Freddy and Franklin fulfill their tropes
traditional roles in horror films.
Within this context, zombies have become another
trope that links disability and deviance together in the popular
imagination. If we take zombies as metaphors of people with
disabilities, then the zombie figure complicates the tropes
that provide a narrative prosthesis to horror films. Although
a cinematic zombies physical attributes would seem to
indicate a stock characterization tool equating them with evil,
films physically connect zombies to their families and loved
ones, despite changes in appearance. They often display
 MCDANIEL 425

recognizably human characteristics such as memory and

trainability and provide the main narrative momentum for the
films in which they appear. Unlike the stories of Franklin and
Freddy, though, zombie stories often lack narrative closure;
characters and viewers rarely discover the how and the why
of the undead transformation. Finally, popular readings of
zombie films highlight the metaphorical power of zombies
to represent cultural tensions, such as racial strife in Night
o f the Living Dead (1968) or rampant consumerism in Dawn
o f the Dead (1978). Nonetheless, these common metaphors
of disability reinforce that disability is something to be
overcome or fixed and imply that the only real or viable
human experienceor at least the most suitable oneis
based on an identifiably normal body. Given the ways that
zombies complicate traditional disability tropes, how might
zombies prompt viewers to question ableist assumptions? In
other words, is zombie culture full of texts that simply enforce
normalcy?
In focusing on the relationship among disability,
deviance, and metaphor, contemporary zombie films, such
as George Romeros Day o f the Dead (1985) and Land
o f the Dead (2005), as well as Edgar Wrights Shaun o f the
Dead (2004), dramatize critiques of traditional models that
examine disability. They move beyond those approaches,
such as the medical or minority models, to explore what Fiona
Kumari Campbell has called the maintenance of abledness
in modified bodies. By using the zombie figure to critique
the ways that ableism becomes em bedded in the cinematic
language of the horror genre, these works examine the process
through which elements of abledness become normalized,
a concept which many theorists now argue should maintain
the focus of disability studies. Unlike Mitchell and Snyders
model of narrative prosthesis, Campbells appraisal of ableism
weakens negative stereotypes by shifting attention from the
person with a disability or the disability itself and redirecting
it toward the strategies defining the standards of an ideal, non
deviant, and ableist body. This framework shows how these
426 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

films self-reflexively interrogate the role that metaphors of

disability play in the horror genre. Relatedly, this framework
shows us how ableism embeds itself not only within the content
of the film but also within the form the film takes. Advancing
this argument, I will offer an overview of the relationship
among disability, deviance, and metaphor in disability studies
and film, outline an approach to disability in horror films
via Campbells assessment, and apply this approach to three
zombie films.

Deviance and Disability: Ableism, the Horror Cine-

genre, and Material Metaphors

Building upon another of my writings that argues for the horror

films role in producing, sustaining, and criticizing ableist
representations, I outline a genre-based version of Fiona
Kumari Campbells ideas concerning ableism in this section.
This approach affords us a way to understand how genres
typically known for manufacturing and recycling negative
representations of characters with disabilities can undermine
those tropes and stereotypes. Building upon criticism from
disability, film, and media studies, this method endorses an
understanding of compulsory ableism as something not only
present in the narrative content viewers experience but also
bound up in the material nature of a film.
In her work on the production of ableism, Campbell
admits that disability studies as a field has often defined ableism
in limiting or fleeting ways, and that many disability theorists
use ableism and disableism synonymously. However, Campbell
disagrees with this absent distinction. She defines ableism as
a network of beliefs, processes, and practices that produces a
particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is
projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential
and fully human. Disability then is cast as a diminished state
of being human (5). However, this ideal ableist body is a
fabrication, and, consequently, an ideal that no one can truly
achieve. For people with disabilities, though, this otherness
 MCDANIEL 427

the lack of conforming to the ableist idealis further

emptied, captured in common terms ... that indicate their
exclusion ... such as suffering from, afflicted with, persistent
vegetative state, ... good and bad leg, among others (x).
Instead of embracing disability at the level of beingness, as an
intrinsic part of the persons Self and as another equally viable
ontology and epistemology, Campbell argues, the processes
of ableism ... induce an internalization or self-loathing which
devalues disablement (20). As a result, regimes of ableism
have produced a depth of disability negation that reaches into
the caverns of collective subjectivity to the extent, Campbell
suggests, that the notion of disability as inherently negative
is seen as a naturalized reaction to an aberration (166).
People with disabilities, however, have not passively accepted
this subjugation and have created transgressive tacticsthe
topic of many chapters in Campbells bookto undermine the
strategies of ableism. These transgressive tactics, which break
normal social boundaries, also serve to align deviance with
disability.
The connection among disability, deviance, and this
naturalized reaction to a body that does not conform to
an unattainable ideal serves as a basis for many studies of
disability. For example, Allison Carey investigates American
disability policies and politics in light of the 1990 Americans
with Disabilities Act, N ancy Gallagher examines the American
Eugenics movement in Vermont, and Henry Friedlander
details the rise of the Nazi Eugenics movement. Each of these
studies offers an historical approach to disability as a marker
of deviant difference. In this context, deviance refers to
beliefs, behaviors, or perceived bodily conditions that violate
a cultural norm and bring about a social reaction to control
or confine such beliefs, behaviors, or conditions. Educational
psychologist Kaoru Yamamoto explains that while [djeviance
is not inherent in any particular pattern of behavior or physical
attribute, singled-out individuals preserve stability in society
by embodying otherwise formless dangers (182). Lennard
Davis elaborates upon Yamamotos argument. In critiquing
428 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

the psychological understandings of human development,

which came to view the norm-as-average-as-natural, Daws
argues that the normal individual (and as a counterpart the
feebleminded, parasitic, and morally questionable individual)
is part of the history of modernist progress and the ideological
merging of bourgeois power. An able body, he argues, is
the body of a citizen. By contrast, deformed, deafened,
amputated, obese, female, perverse, crippled, maimed, and
blinded bodies do not make up the body politic (71-72). A
persons body consequently fixes his or her identity within
the nation, creating a kind of static relationship between the
individual and the body politic. In this light, the body acts as
a kind of property that ultimately defines a subjects individual
identity within a supposedly proper national identity as well
as that subjects relationship to other national inhabitants.
Cultural definitions of propriety overcode the disabled body
with dominant cultural ideas concerning a particular persons
or groups correct role and contribution to a national identity,
and society interprets transgressions of that role as deviant
behavior.
Formations of the type of deviance that Davis and
Yamamoto consider have played major roles in cinema since
the beginnings of film art. Several critics recently have
examined, in the words of Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic,
the ways in which disability in [cinematic] narrative is both
excessively visible and conversely invisible. According to
Chivers and Markotic, disabled bodies appear in order to
shore up a sense of normalcy and strength in a presumed-to-be
able-bodied audience, but rarely do these bodies demonstrate
any form of agency (1). Similarly, Martin Norden describes
the ways studio heads, directors, and other key Hollywood
influencers created a segregated culture both at studios and
in films. This culture isolated disabled characters from their
able-bodied peers as well as from each other (1). Marking,
classifying, and controlling the disabled body occurred often
in Hollywood cinema through, for example, separate cafeterias
for performers deemed disabled (which happened on MGMs
 MCDANIEL 429

lot during filming for Tod Brownings 1932 film Freaks) or

through set-design elements, such as stairs or fences, that
suggest material or symbolic separation of disabled characters
from the rest of society.
Starting in the earliest stages of cinema history,
then, the filmmaking industry has recycled both material
(mise-en-scene, composition, cinematography, and editing)
and imaginative (narrative) devices for the purposes of
pushing people with disabilities to the margins. Both Davis
and Yamamoto suggest the cultural importance of classifying
disabled bodies by fitting them into a narrative of deviance for
surveillance and control. Likewise, Chivers, Markotic, and
Norden show how this marginalizing impulse has historically
influenced the production of film narratives. These material
and imaginative devices have endorsed the disabled body as an
aberrant body. Only through telling the right story (content)
in the right manner (form) can these marginalized bodies
become dangerous and deviant, and the kinds of narratives
that typically unfold in horror films give ample opportunity to
develop images that associate disability with deviance.
In focusing on form and content in this way, I propose
that genre affects the ways media classify disability for the
purpose of creating deviant, disabled identities. The horror
genre offers an especially fruitful opportunity for this kind of
analysis because of the elements of its genre especially^ its
focus on representations of deviance and its own deviant role
in film studies. Many times, critics view horror as a derivative
genre due to its graphic depictions of violence and sex, and
this critique is often warranted in films designated torture
porn, for example. However, outside of Sharon Snyder and
David Mitchells essay on spectatorship and body genres,
the influence of genre on representations of disability remains
largely unexamined. While Snyder and Mitchells emphasis on
the ways disabled bodies have been constructed cinematically
and socially to function as delivery vehicles in the transfer of
extreme sensation to audiences provides a useful framework,
their analysis focuses on what film critic Tom Gunning calls
430 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

narrative-centered genre criticism (186). This approach to

film genre entails a number of problems, such as the arbitrary
classifications and subdivisions within those classifications that
you find on Netflix. For example, does a film like Ridley Scotts
Alien (1979), with its monstrous lifeform, claustrophobic
setting, and over-the-top ending, belong in horror or science
fiction? According to Gunning, genres originate from both
the specificity of film and the practices of the film industry
(50). In terms of the film industry, genres act as modes of
communication between film professionals seeking to promote
content on the one hand and film audiences looking for certain
types of cinematic experiences on the other.
In terms of film specificity, Gunning argues that a more
effective way of studying film genre involves what he calls
cine-genres by focusing on how formal aspects of cinema
may relate to genre patterns (58). The Russian Formalist film
theorist Andrei Piotrovskij originally coined the expression in
his 1927 essay Toward a Theory of Cine-Genres. The term
cine-genre refers to the stylistic specificity of genre films via the
expressive devices innate to cinema. Particular camera angles
and transitions or the composition of a films mise-en-scene
the material apparatuses of cinemacreate a distinct film form
known as the horror film, for example. Gunning writes, While
narrative-centered genre criticism inevitably approaches the
specific devices of cinema as means of expressing semantic or
syntactic elements, a genre criticism founded in the specificity
of cinema might describe genres as ways of narrativizing
and naturalizing primal fascinations present in cinematic
form itself (60). One of the many examples Gunning offers
involves horrors ontological ambiguity inherent in film form
(59). By ontological ambiguity, Gunning references films
ability to merge the simultaneous presence and absence of the
subject in the projected image. He points to Wes Cravens
A Nightmare on Elm Street series as a way in which horror
films engage this uncanny nature of cinemain this case, the
blurring of the line between nightmare and waking life as
an integral part of its genre. Close attention to these formal
 MCDANIEL 431

elements of cinematic language provides insight into how the

maintenance of abledness, to use Campbells phrase, becomes
embedded within the specificity of film genres and how these
processes of ableism facilitate the ostracizing of people with
disabilities by linking disability with deviance.
Applying a critique of ableism to examples of
contemporary zombie films emphasizes the processes through
which the strategies of abledness become normalized. Within
this context, zombies often become what I call a material
metaphor that helps to internalize compulsory ableness,
to link deviance with disability', and to critique ableism in
certain instances. Katherine Hayles originated the phrase
material metaphor in Writing Machines to describe digital
communication, such as the e-mail inbox icon, that initiate
real-world action and stand in for computer processes (21).
A material metaphor interrogates the inscription technology
that produces it and mobilizes reflexive loops between its
imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying
that creation as a physical presence (25). By using material
metaphor, however, I extend the traditional methods critics
have used to relate disability and metaphor as a narrative
tropenamely the ways that a disabled body is represented as
a metaphor for emotional or spiritual deficiency and the use of
disability'related language in a metaphorical way. Instead, I focus
on form. By material metaphor, I do not mean, for example,
how Hershel G reens augmented gait after his amputation in
The Walking Dead might metaphorically connect him to the
walkers. Instead, I refer to those symbolic moments in a text
when an image or idea related to disability calls attention to
the ways that an aspect of a films form validates or destabilizes
embedded ableism. By viewing the zombie as a metaphor of
people with disabilities and as often a material metaphor that
can interrogate the material nature of films, we can uncover
the horror genres methods that depict people with disabilities
as always-already less than the ableist ideal and, thus, always-
already deviant.
432 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

To summarize, this cine-genre analysis of material

metaphor through the lens of compulsory ableism will
1. Move beyond representation to structure, just like
disability studies is moving beyond a focus on disability
to constructions of compulsory ableism
2. Show how a specific genre manifests compulsory
ableism in diverse ways
3. Extend the use of metaphor in disability
studies criticism
4. Show how genres known for recycling negative
images of disability can provide critiques of
those images

Prosthetic Legs and Shuffling Bodies: Zombies as

Metaphors and Material Metaphors

In The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s, Robin Wood

defines the key characteristic of horror as when normality is
threatened by the Monster (31). For Wood, the monster
embodies an Otherness that bourgeois ideology cannot
recognize or accept but must deal with by either rejecting and
destroying it or by rendering it safe through assimilation (27).
Using examples from The Walking Dead and a series of public
service announcements (PSAs) produced by the Disability
Action C enter in Moscow, Idaho, this section will discuss
the various ways in which zombies become conventional
and convenient metaphors for people with disabilities via
this process of Othering that Wood describes. Then, using
examples from George Romeros Day o f the Dead and Land
o f the Dead as well as Edgar Wright s Shaun o f the Dead, I will
show how zombies become material metaphors and how this
conception of the figure provides us with a way to see how the
horror genre both produces and critiques structural ableism
in film.
Pulling in an average of over 14 million viewers per
week during its fifth season, The Walking Dead belongs
alongside George Romeros Night o f the Living Dead and
 MCDANIEL 433

Daivn o f the Dead as one of the most influential horror works

involving zombies. With its diverse cast of characters and its
use of traditional slow-moving zombies, critics and viewers
praise the show for its acting, characterization, and approach
to world building. In one of its most memorable storylines
from the third and fourth seasons, the show introduces both its
first character with a visible disability and the first to survive a
zombie bite: Hershel Greene.
Through the character of Hershel Greene and his
uncanny likeness to the zombies that surround him, The
Walking Dead shows how the figure of the zombie can serve as
a metaphor for various marginalized groups, but especially for
people with disabilities. Scott Wilson, the actor who portrays
the now deceased Hershel Greene in The Walking Dead, said
in a 2012 interview on the shows official blog:

When [a Walking Dead producer and writer] told me they were

going to chop my leg off, of course my first thought was, Oh, there
I go! But just the opposite: He said he wanted someone with
a disability and I understand that. Its also very interesting that
Hershel was the first one to have survived a bite. The question I
think for Hershel is whether he is going to become a liability for
the group. Is he going to be able to carry his load?

Wilson also describes the prosthetics that the special effects

team used to show the removal of his leg, and he remarks in
the same interview, [Hershel] needs to show that he is combat
ready and that he can contribute. His age and his life experience
helps a bit. But Im hoping right now that sometimes hell have
a prosthetic.
Wilsons comments, his performance of Hershel, and
the producer/writers reasoning behind the characters loss of
limb reveal how the narrative constructs zombies and people
with disabilities in problematically comparable ways. For the
producer/writer who developed this storyline, the inclusion of
a character with a disability links to Mitchell and Snyders idea
of narrative prosthesis, as a narrative addition that acts as both
a convenient characterization tool and metaphorical device.
Though viewers know from the beginning that Hershel loses his
434 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

leg via a zombie bite, the need for narrative closure concerning
his disability comes not from cause but rather from effect: Will
the amputation save his life? Will his disability affect his role
in the group? Similarly, in The Walking Dead as well as many
other zombie films, the cause of the zombie outbreak is less
important than the response to it. Again, effect wins out over
cause. Indeed, we rarely receive an explanation for the zombie
presence in film, a tradition that began with Night o f the Living
Dead. Metaphorically speaking, Hershel fits the Wise Old
Man Jungian archetype, a character who appears throughout
literature and film and whose ability' to overcome disability
(often blindness but also other physical impairments) works as
a symbol of the character s great inner strength and principled
thinking. The zombie, then, connects to this figurative use of
Hershel through contrast; zombies on the show are instinctual
and act on impulse, unlike the thoughtful and rational Hershel.
Hershels survival becomes a type of inspiration porn, a
phrase that refers to inspirational stories depicting people with
disabilities supposedly overcoming obstacles when in actuality
they are simply performing actions that people without
disabilities do on a regular basis. Many characters survive, but
Hershels survival is special and bubbles over with pathos.
The similar gait of Hershel and the zombies is their
strongest visual similarity. Zombies embody the manner and
posture of cerebral palsy, for example, as well as other physical
disabilities. In his portrayal of Hershel, Wilson moves in a
comparable way, particularly as he first grows accustomed to
his missing leg. This link between walking and the inability to
walk extends into what the show calls zombies: walkers. The
idea of zombies as walkers brings further attention to their
gait and movement. The fact that a walker is also a name for
a mobility device and that Hershel needs a mobility device to
move after his leg amputation contributes to the idea that the
fear of becoming a walker is actually a metaphorical fear of not
being able to walk in a normal way. This fear comes full circle
as Hershel dies by the hands of another character. Although
the show regularly kills off characters, it plays Hershels death
 MCDANIEL 435

for the particular emotional impact typical of the deaths

of disabled characters. His death also highlights a question
similar to an oft asked question about George Romeros Night
o f the Living Dead : why are there no African-American
zombies? Similarly, in The Walking Dead, why are there no
zombies with disabilities? Their absence, especially among the
diverse wave of zombies seen in the series, emphasizes that the
zombie Otherness is reserved for the able bodied. People
with disabilities are already Others.
The kinship between zombies and people with
disabilities extends beyond the fictional into the realm of
public discourse. For example, the Disability Action Center
(DAC) in Moscow, Idaho, has created a series of PSAs called
Dont Be A Zombie! In each video, a male zombie character
responds to a person with a disability in a problematic way.
He might give visual directions to a person who is visually
impaired, not provide adequate aisle space in his business
for a person in a wheelchair, or use accessible parking. The
DACs spokespersona person in a wheelchairthen appears
on screen to offer a corrected response. On the one hand,
the DAC uses a zombie to reflect humorously on the often
unthinking ways people without disabilities respond to
people with disabilities. In an interview, the DACs CEO Mark
Leeper comments that the clips consequently do not have the
sting of [an] average American person [saying], boy were you
being ridiculous in doing whatever you did. He continues,
You can make fun of a zom bie.... You can point a finger at a
zombie. Sometimes they fall off. Hopefully not ours but the
zombies do.
On the other hand, the DAC uses a zombie an
arguably not able bodied figureto distance people without
disabilities from the perhaps unintentionally (though not always)
disrespectful actions they perform toward disabled people. On
the surface, this initiative seems like an inventive educational
experience; however, the DAC calls attention to markers of
difference in order to indulge people without disabilities. Like
Hershels walk and the zombies gait, the way the zombie acts
436 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

in the PSAs links it with disability. The zombie s initial inability

to communicate verbally or only through grunts and growls
evokes the communication practices of various cognitive
disabilities and the verbal practices associated with autism
and other social/emotional impairments. In moving from the
incorrect to the correct way to address people with disabilities,
however, the zombie begins speaking with a normal voice.
Thus, the clip speaks to the medical model of disability, which
treats people with disabilities as objects to be fixed rather than
as authors of their own lives. This focus on repair instead of
changing circumstances implies that a person with a disability
simply needs to learn how to negotiate the world in a correct way
to prevent marginalizing influences or, as Robin Wood would
say, experience the world as an able bodied monogamous
heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalist (25). Finally, the
zombie constantly loses fingers, which brings to mind the fears
from The Walking Dead concerning Hershels bodily integrity
and its effect on his performance. The C EO s hopefulness that
the zombie loses fingers but that we as viewers, as able bodied
people do not, discloses this fear of perceived somatic fracture.
Through these examples and their demonstrable
fear of a fragmented body that the zombie brings, zombies
and people with disabilities become entangled at the level
of representation. Next, I will show how this entanglement
transcends content and moves into the structure of media,
how the zombie moves from acting as a metaphor to a material
metaphor.
For this analysis, I return to Gunnings assertion
that one aspect of the horror cine-genre derived from film
specificity is ontological uncertaintythe ability to merge
the simultaneous presence and absence of the subject in the
projected image. Zombies are particularly good at producing
ontological uncertainty, as they act as afterimages of the people
they once were. In fact, many characters find themselves
at the wrong end of a zombies bite due to their inability to
separate the zombie from the person that the zombie used
to be. However, other works in zombie culture, including
 MCDANIEL 437

Andrew Curries film Fido (2006), Jonathan Levines film

Warm Bodies (2013), and Bennett Simss novel A Questionable
Shape (2013), acknowledge and explore the idea that this
Otherness remains only a constructed Otherness and that
zombies are simply experiencing the world, a view that aligns
with Fiona Kumari Campbells idea of embracing disability
as a fundamental part of beingness. Nonetheless, this innate
Sameness and Otherness of the zombie exemplifies the core
idea of compulsory ableness, the processes that produce the
notion that people with disabilities have failed to attain a
corporeal ideal and are therefore less human and, in horror
films, deviant.
Campbells analysis of the production of ableism
highlights three critiques of the ableist impulse that frame
my reading of contemporary zombie culture, starting with the
internalization of compulsory ableness. Campbell uses Critical
Race Theory (CRT) and its scrutiny of internalized racism to
provide a context for internalized compulsory ableness, which
gives two equally negative options: either to hate ones self as
culture requests or to have no sense of self at all. Thus, the
resulting problem is essentially an ontological one: that this
non-recognition of ableism suggests that disability does not
matter (21-22). Involuntary disavowal results from recurrent
and frequent negative images and the relegation of disability
to the background, which helps to control behavior. Thus,
Campbell writes, The pathologisation of disability has meant
that therapy predominantly concentrates on normalisation and
is not necessarily directed to attending to the harms of ableism
(e.g. living with prejudice) (21). Culture tolerates disability
or seeks to fix it in some way rather than seeing it as simply
another way of experiencing the world and as another type of
human diversity.
Horror films represent this internalized ableism
through the repeated use of a medium shot to depict characters
with disabilities or, in the case of zombies, characters who
act as material metaphors for people with disabilities. Along
with its cousins the medium-close shot and medium-long
438 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

shot, the medium shot is one of the most ubiquitous shots in

films. In cinematography, this shot and the lens used to take it
supposedly depict the normal vision of the human eye instead
of distorting the perspective in the ways that lenses with long
and short focal lengths do. Additionally, film scholars see the
medium shot as the most objective shot in cinematography,
in contrast to high angle and low angle shots, which typically
indicate either a sense of powerlessness or powerfulness,
respectively.
However, the material metaphor of the zombie
complicates this normalizing impulse of the medium shot,
which we see in Romero s Day o f the Dead. From the first shot
that viewers have of a zombie in the opening sequence, the
film establishes a pattern of using medium shots to show the
zombie form. O f course, part of the rationale behind this shot
in the film is to show the various amounts of zombie decay,
yet it also marks the zombie s similarities and differences with
the main characters. Because form and content work together
to produce meaning, the context of when the medium shots
occur help us understand that these shots refer to people with
disabilities in a metaphorical way. For example, in one scene,
Dr. Logan, the main scientist who attempts to socialize the
zombies out of their need to eat human flesh, says, They are
us. They are the extensions of us. They are the same animal
simply functioning less perfectly. They can be fooled, you see?
They can be tricked into being good little girls and boys. This
language evokes connections with The Walking Dead and the
Disability' Action Center that depict people with disabilities
from the perspective of the medical model of disability, as
having a problem to be diagnosed, cured, and controlled. It
also promotes ontological uncertainty inherent to horror films
through invoking the zombies Sameness and Otherness. Dr.
Logan acknowledges their humanity while simultaneously
saying they are less than human. Within this context, Dr. Logan
introduces us to Bub, his most successful zombie trainee.
The objectifying gaze of the medical room medium-
close shot, the shot that the film most often uses in showing
 MCDANIEL 439

us Bub learning to wear headphones or to salute Dr. Logan,

fosters Bubs role as a scientific object to be explored, explained,
and fixed. Interestingly, though, the camera also often depicts
Dr. Logan from this same implied distance from the camera,
the medium-close shot. The matching shots of Bub and
Dr. Logan attempt to undermine ontological uncertainty by
visually having the scientist identified with the zombie. As
a material metaphor of disability, the zombie calls attention
to the supposed objective and normative ways that camera
shots depict people with disabilities, exposing the fictitious
ideas of normal and average. As the movie continues, the
scientists attempts to place Bub within a narrative of deviance
for surveillance or for healing fails to diagnose or discipline
the supposed deviant, disabled body. In Bubs final scene,
the camera has done away with the objective medium shot,
transitioning instead to a long shot that offers Bubs full body as
he chases down Captain Rhodes, who has earlier killed Bubs
Dr. Logan. The long shot creates distance between the films
audience and Bub, who is seeking revenge for Dr. Logans
murder. Viewers lose that sense of objectivity offered through
the medium shot and instead come to see Bub as motivated by
a desire for a specific outcome. Ultimately, in shooting Captain
Rhodes with a gun and saluting him as he dies amongst the
zombie horde, Bub demonstrates independent thought and
agency, qualities that indicate hes no longer the automaton
simply repeating what he has learned.
The second aspect of Campbells critique of ableism
involves what she calls the tactics of dispersal, or the distancing
of disabled people from each other (22). She argues that many
prominent approaches by disability service workers explicitly
discourage community making among persons with disabilities
and other minorities. This strategy of dispersal, predicated on
the belief disabled people should not draw attention to each
other via mixing, leads to a perceived dispersal of deviance,
which generates internalized ableism in that mixing with
other people with impairments is interpreted as a negative,
inadvisable choice (23). Campbell promotes sub-cultural
440 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

spaces not segregated or institutional environmentsin

which within group processes act as a sanctuary for healing
internalized oppression (24).
Horror films entrench these tactics of dispersal
through the use of open and closed framing in mise-en-scene.
A closed frame provides a mise-en-scene that does not need
to acknowledge the existence of off-screen space to express
narrative meaning because the frame contains all the material
needed for the shot. Closed framing can imply that other
forces have robbed characters of their ability to move and
act freely. A closed frame lends a sense of claustrophobia,
so many horror films use this framing technique to limit the
world by shutting it down and providing only one view of the
depicted subject. In contrast, an open frame (which is the
most common) uses the frames composition to show that it
does not contain all of the information necessary for viewers
to understand narrative meaning. Open frames require a
mise-en-scene that draws attention to elements that lay off
screen and depict a world where characters move freely within
an accessible and identifiable setting. Closed and open framing
relates to tactics of dispersal in a couple of ways. First, framing
can isolate a character on the screen either by depicting the
character as alone within a wide space (as in an open frame) or
by restricting the character s available movement (as in a closed
frame). Second, framing can indicate the sub-cultural spaces
that Campbell describes by visually creating these refuge
locations. Open and closed frames in horror films cultivate
ontological uncertainty within viewers by having them call into
question boundaries of cinematic space, and what might lie
beyond those boundaries.
Both Daij o f the Dead and Shaun o f the Dead use the
material metaphor of the zombie to examine the relationship
between framing and disability. In Bubs early appearances,
the camera depicts him in Dr. Logan s lab often using a closed
frame. In this context, this closed frame indicates his isolation
from the rest of the zombies, and these moments during
the film occur when Dr. Logan provides Bubs training to
 MCDANIEL 441

normalize him. The closed frame symbolizes the dispersal

that Campbell describes, a dispersal that prevents Bubs self-
awareness and the creation of group identity. Indeed, the lab is
reminiscent of stereotypical portrayals of institutional settings
in films depicting people with disabilities: no windows, a
lack of space, and cold and sterile interiors. Alongside the
medium shots of Bub, the closed frame further emphasizes
his isolation, his separateness, and his role as simply a scientific
subject. After escaping from the lab, however, Bub is regularly
depicted within an open frame. Bub has departed what Dr.
Logan defined as a safe space but not a safe space that Bub had
defined for himself.
Similarly, in Shaun o f the Dead, the character of Ed
ends up in a closed frame after getting bitten by a zombie
earlier in the film. At the end of the film, the audience discovers
that Shaun is keeping his zombie friend chained out in a shed
behind his house and that during his breaks from his work day,
Shaun makes his way to the shed to play video games with Ed.
Consequently, the film depicts both Ed and Shaun playing
video games within a closed frame in the movies final shot.
The separation of zombie Ed from the rest of the world might
seem initially problematic; if we do take zombies as a metaphor
of people with disabilities, then this practice of hiding and
chaining might appear punitive and harmful. However, the
closed framing emphasizes Ed and Shauns shared purpose,
intention, and directed action through gaming, an activity that
has connected them earlier in the film. This gaming safe space
is based upon E ds individual and unique preferences, unlike
Bub, whose supposed safe space is defined for him.
The third and final aspect of Campbells critique of
ableism calls attention to defensive Othering (24). Campbell
says, Defensive Othering occurs when the marginalized
person attempts to emulate the hegemonic norm, whiteness,
or ableism, and assumes the legitimacy of a devalued identity
imposed by the dominant group... (24). Such passing, she
says, is about keeping the colonizer happy by not disturbing the
peace and containing the matter that is potentially out of place.
442 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

Within this context, internalized ableism often places a disabled

person in a liminal positionbetween the proverbial rock and a
hard place. Due to the internalization of compulsory ableness,
In order to attain the benefit of a disabled identity, one must
constantly participate in the processes of disability disavowal,
aspire towards the norm, reach a state of nearabledbodiedness,
or at the very least to effect a state of passing (25).
The roots of defensive Othering come through in the
horror films editing. Editing implies both temporal and spatial
relationships between images in a film. It typically seeks to
achieve logic, smoothness, sequential flow, and the temporal
and spatial orientation of the viewers to the images seen
onscreen. However, horror film directors often use editing
to disorient the viewer through, for example, jump cuts that
produce the infamous jump scares or parallel editing, in
which two or more actions are happening at the same time
but at different locations. Because editing controls temporal
and spatial relationships, it also controls the ways in which
those juxtaposed images communicate with one another.
For example, graphic match cuts use the similarity of shapes
between two images to create a connection, so that the circular
shape of an eye depicted on the screen might cut to a similar
circular shape, such as a wheel or the sun. Likewise, a cut
on action hides the instantaneous and potentially jarring shift
from one camera viewpoint to another. Thus, editing typically
works to eliminate uncertainty within viewers by helping
them see the connections between one image and the next.
In horror films, however, uncertainty is often magnified rather
than eliminated.
Through the use of graphic match cuts and cuts on
action, Shaun o f the Dead and Romeros Land o f the Dead
both reveal the problems associated with defensive Othering.
In Shaun o f the Dead, our group of protagonists seeks a
stronghold that is easily defendable against the zombies. In
one scene, though, they attempt to move through a large
group by passing as zombies themselves. In this sequence,
the camera uses cuts on action to show the movements of the
 MCDANIEL 443

zombies and the protagonists fruitless attempts to replicate

them. In seeing the zombie as representative of disability,
then, the able bodied protagonists are seeking to emulate the
bodily movements of disability. Through the cuts on action, this
moment supports Campbells critique of passing by inverting
the typical danger involved in passing, namely that the danger
is to the person who has tried to pass but has failed. Similarly,
at the end of Land o f the Dead, a graphic match cut between
the figure of Big Daddy (the lead zombie of the film) and the
figure of Riley (one of the films protagonists) connect the two
by visually joining their similar body shapes. When asked if his
team should blow up the bridge on which Big Daddy and other
zombies are standing, Riley responds, Theyre just looking for
a place to go. Same as us. Along with Rileys remark, the
graphic match cut bridges the gap between the protagonists
temporarily abled bodies (a term in disability studies alluding
to our inevitable decline, through age, disease, or accident) and
the zombies. Thus, through Rileys comment and the visual
connection between him and Big Daddy, the film reveals the
fictional nature of the norm all bodies attempt to conform to
and fail to achieve.
This essay has proposed a framework for using
Campbells critique of compulsory ableism to assess how genre
and its material features play a role in cinematic portrayals of
disability. Following a current trend in disability studies, this
framework shifts away from a focus on disabilities themselves
and instead to the ways in which social, cultural, and aesthetic
processes produce ableism. Though on a surface level this
essay focuses on zombies, it shows how ableism manifests
itself within seemingly innocuous works unrelated to disability
in order to make us more conscientious about the effects of
ableism, both overt and covert.
444 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

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